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There may not be life on Mars, but there’s action.

The first photo of wait appears to be a landslide on a steep Martian slope was caught by accident at the University of Arizona when an employee was routinely examining photos from the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera.

“I was looking at the image just to see if it was OK. I happened to see a puff of dust. I said, “Is that a landslide or just a low cloud?

“Honestly, my first response was, “What is that?,”” said Ingrid Daubar Spitale, the uplink operations lead on the HiRISE imaging team at the UA’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory.

A UA team designed and operates the digital camera photographing Mars from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. UA LPL scientist, Alfred McEwen, is the principal investigator — the lead scientist — on the project.

The camera had just come out of a “safe mode,” McEwen said, something it does after an apparent error or malfunction. He said one detector on the camera sometimes “acts up” after being turned back on and the image was being checked for signs of that malfunction.

McEwen said experts still aren’t absolutely sure what they area seeing is a landslide. He said it’s possible, though less likely, that it’s the results of wind stirring up dust. Something known to happen on Mars.

But he said a team member working in Switzerland has been studying ice blocks on Mars and the thinking is that a ice block may have broken loose and caused the avalanche.

Images taken from the orbiter by the HiRISE camera are sent back to Earth as radio signals, received by giant dish antennae in the Mojave Desert, Spain and Australia and relayed to the UA, where they are examined. But the images may sit for a long time before they are fully examined.

Spitale said the image covers a much larger strip of land — roughly 4 miles wide by 40 miles long — than the landslide area. The point of the photo was actually in another section of the image, where scientists were looking for seasonal changes in the carbon dioxide frost.

She said the blurry cloud, which appears to be dust hanging in the atmosphere above the slide area, suggests it must have happened just before the picture was taken.

Although the CCD digital camera that is the heart of HiRISE isn’t exactly comparable to a common digital camera, she said the effective shutter speed was very fast.

As the orbiter flies roughly 200 miles above the surface of Mars in a polar orbit (from pole to pole, rather than equatorially), the effective “shutter speed” is varied to compensate for the motion of the orbiter. “Instead of opening and closing a shutter (as on a traditional camera), we have a line of (light) detectors, we gather light line by line,” Spitale said.

The false color image was made using three filters on the camera — red, blue/green and near infrared, Spitale said.

“You can’t really see the full range of colors you’d see with your eyes, but it gives you a sense of composition — what it’s made up of,” Spitale said.

“We were just checking the camera making sure everything was working right,” Spitale said. “It was chance.”

In fact, McEwen said, there could be other exciting details in the hundreds of images taken by HiRISE, but not yet thoroughly examined by scientists.

The HiRISE team uplinks (transmits) computer-style commands through the Deep Space Network to the orbiter and HiRISE to tell it what to photograph and how to do it.

Later, the photographs are downlinked to Tucson, where they are examined by technicians and scientists, and posted to the UA’s and NASA’s HiRISE Web sites.

McEwen said the team doesn’t “have enough eyes” to examine all the HiRISE photos in detail. So, it could have been a fourth-grade class that found the landslide.