Overhead View of the Beauty of Mars

It's a challenge to even imagine what it would be like to peer out the window of your mid-flight plane trip to gaze upon the surface of Mars.

Such a scenario, after all, would mean that your flight went seriously off course. And you'd have a hard time getting word to the person you'd previously arranged to pick you up at the airport to please hang tight and wait for updated arrival information. And who knows where your luggage might have ended up.

Thanks to NASA, however, new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Oribiter (MRO) give a pretty clear picture -- thousands of pictures, actually -- of what the surface of the Red Planet would look like from above.

With the assistance of researchers at the University of Arizona, a vast image data set collected by the MRO has been compiled for release to the public, showing Mars to demonstrate a compellingly varied surface replete with channels, craters, gullies and crystalline deposits of varying and sometimes vibrant hues.

The full set of images, many of which are truly out of this world, are available for review at NASA's MRO Web site.

Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona