Well, we're not past opposition, but the images are still coming in (about 70 in the last month!), and looking great! Cap clouds over the various volcanoes are easy to see, as is the residual north polar cap and even clouds in Hellas Basin. When imaged in blue light, and stretched, the entire aphelion cloud belt can even be seen. Not seeing much evidence for dust storms, but then, this isn't really the season for them.

Today, if the weather holds out here in South Jersey, our Rowan University Department of Physics and Astronomy will be holding an observatory open house where yours truly will be running an 8" telescope trained on Mars. We'll also be recommissioning our 0.4 m telescope (it was down for mirror cleaning and some analysis to come up with a solution to reduce high frequency vibrations caused by building air handling). If you're in the area, drop by!

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is still going strong. In fact, in March the HiRISE instrument captured an image of a dust devil wending across the surface! And the MARCI instrument continues to create its weekly global images; here's the one fro 19–15 March 2012. According to the mission web site, MRO has sent back almost 159 TB (yes, terrabytes) of data. That's a lot of analysis yet to be done.

Opportunity is still parked on the rim of Endeavour Crater for the southern winter season but doing some science even with its low energy levels. It's working on collecting microimagry and X-Ray spectroscopy of a nearby rock. And its even trying to get a low light panorama image set of its surroundings.

Curiosity is still in cruise phase, on its way Mars. As of yesterday, it is halfway there; the countdown to landing is just over 125 days. The first two mid-course corrections have gone well.

And, just in case you forgot about it, the 2001 Mars Odyssey is still going after 10 years in orbit; that makes it the longest running Mars mission ever!

It's almost here! It was a great sight last night as I left the office to look up in the sky and see Venus, Jupiter, and a very bright, and very reddish, Mars. Granted, due to campus lighting those three, plus the Moon and Sirius were about all I could see...

I'm really enjoying all the images being submitted. It is truly some impressive work and fun to go through the images over time to see the transformation of Mars from small round object as it came out of conjunction to the detailed world near opposition.

This Saturday my home institution (Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ) will be hosting an open house and we'll have a small cadre of telescopes on the building rooftop [above the campus lighting!] so that any and all visitors can see Mars for themselves.

Well, at least that's the plan...the weather report seems to be disagreeing with us but we'll make that call sometime mid-afternoon.

Mars opposition is getting closer and imaging of the Red Planet is really stepping up. I want to thank all the MarsWatch contributors for their donations—just click on the Images link in the menu to see our journey so far.

Again, if any Mars observers are maintaining their own site for their images, I'd like to hear from you (just click on my name below) and I'll add a like to your site at the bottom of the images page. Preferably a link directly to your Mars images page.

In rover news, Curiosity (the Mars Science Laboratory) is under way to Mars after a successful launch last (USA) Thanksgiving weekend. The MSL team has put out a short story on the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and its calibration targets. The color chips are leftovers from the MER program (Spirit and Opportunity) which, assuming there was no degradation in the pigments, means MSL images will be calibrated in the same way as the MER images making intercomparison easier.

As a side note: I can't help but wonder if the timing of the release of Disney's John Carter movie was chosen to coincide with opposition, or was chosen simply because March is the month of Mars. Or if they were just totally clueless and it's simply coincidence. I'm assuming it's the last one.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, has lifted off and is on its way to Mars! It is scheduled to land next August after about 8.5 months of cruise.

It's finally going to happen: the most ambitious rover ever created is going to be heading to Mars next week! The mission is known as the Mars Science Laboratory and the official name of the rover is Curiosity. It is currently sitting atop an Atlas V rocket awaiting its launch date of 25 November 2011—that's the day after Thanksgiving for those of us in the USA. The plan is to have it liftoff at 10:21 AM EST.

The landing site, Gale Crater just south of the martian equator in Elysium Planitia was selected in July in a process that started back in 2006. The crater is somewhat degraded, meaning all kinds of interesting geology has been happening there. Recent work studying orbital imaging has found many channels that appear to fluvial in nature as well as rock layers that may be composed of water-altered materials like clays and sulfates.

You can get even more info from JPL's MSL site.