Mars Like You've Never Seen It

About 11 years after it arrived, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has now circled the Red Planet 50,000 times as of this week, NASA announced.

The spacecraft is showing no signs of slowing down, say mission officials.

"After 11 and a half years in flight, the spacecraft is healthy and remains fully functional," MRO project manager Dan Johnston, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "It's a marvelous vehicle that we expect will serve the Mars Exploration Program and Mars science for many more years to come."

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The $720 million mission launched in August 2005 before actually entering Mars' orbit in March 2006, according to Live Science. Since then, its cameras have mapped nearly the entire surface of the Red Planet.

"Reaching 99.1-percent coverage has been tricky because [of] a number of factors, including weather conditions, coordination with other instruments, downlink limitations, and orbital constraints, tend to limit where we can image and when," Context Camera Team Leader Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, said in the statement.

Aside from shooting photos, the MRO has performed a variety of duties, from searching for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet to scouting out possible landing locations for future missions.

The probe is helping to prepare for the November 2018 arrival of NASA's InSight Mars lander, NASA officials said. InSight is scheduled to launch in May 2018.

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