It seems the landslides in PSP_007338_2640 have caught a lot of attention!

There has been a lot of online and print news coverage: CNN, Time, Fox News, Astronomy, Space.com, New Scientist, National Geographic, and our local Arizona Daily Star, among many others. The New York Times made a really nice slide show that includes the avalanche, the Earth-Moon image, as well as other great images from our big PDS release. Blogs are talking about it (Cumbrian Sky and the Bad Astronomy Blog, to name just two). People over at unmannedspaceflight.com are discussing the avalanches a lot, too. (I’m sure there are tons I’ve missed – apologies – if you feel left out, post it in a comment below!)

A co-worker heard NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me featured a question about the avalanches on Saturday. It was even the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday!

I’ve talked personally to a lot of people about it, too. It’s amazing how it’s caught everyone’s interest. I think most people who see it for the first time have the same “Holy crap!” reaction that we all had when we first saw it here at HiROC. Then they start trying to figure out what’s going on, what caused it, what it means, how we can take more data and look at past images to narrow down different hypotheses… which is exactly the process that scientists go through!

The best part of the story, I think, is how the landslide was serendipitously captured in an image, and then accidentally noticed! HiRISE has sent back such an incredible volume of highly detailed data, no one person has time to study it all in full resolution. We’ve released 17 Terabytes, thousands of images, and it’s very likely that more surprises like this are waiting to be discovered in them. So go look at more HiRISE images; let us know what you find! We can’t wait to see how Mars can surprise us further.

Thanks for being as excited about HiRISE and Mars as we are!