Your House at HiRISE Resolution
I was helping to prepare a presentation for a local high school, and I thought it would be cool to show them a picture of their school as HiRISE would see it. My first thought was the satellite layer in Google Maps. So I zoomed way in and took a screenshot. I wasn’t able to find a reference for the pixel scale of the satellite imagery (if anyone knows of one, please leave it in a comment!), so finally I just figured it out myself by using the Distance Measurement Tool. Turns out, if you zoom in as far as possible, the satellite images have almost exactly the same resolution as HiRISE! (This is true in Tucson, anyway; the coverage varies over different locations.) I thought this was a great way to visualize just how awesome HiRISE images are – just imagine looking at Mars like you can look at your home town on Google maps! 
…I guess that makes the rovers like Mars StreetView. 
This is my neighborhood as HiRISE would see it: (Look at all those pools! Tucson is not nearly as dry as Mars )
April 30th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
The imagery you are looking at is 1/2-foot resolution taken in 2005. I know, I know — who measures resolution in feet?? Surveyors! So that’s about 15 cm/pixel, which is somewhat better than HiRISE. I think the compression techniques that Google uses to make the imagery load fast *seems* to degrade the quality a little, so you can probably get away with your comparison. It would be worth pointing out that the images in Google Earth at this resolution are taken from aircraft that are flying much closer to the ground than MRO. Good luck with the presentation! This is a great way to demonstrate the power of HiRISE.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I think comparing this to Google Earth really helps me visualize how amazing the HiRISE is, even if it does not compare exactly. It gives us visual people a quick comparison without any mathematical skills. Also, the HiRISE images are probably more current than the Google ones. Fabulous HiRISE images.