Given the greater onboard memory -- 3 gigabytes! -- and much greater bandwidth, nearly 1 megabyte/second, NASA is advertising that the area covered by MRO hi-res photos will be at least 10 times greater than for MGS.

I hadn't realized how big MOR is: more than 3x the size of Odessey and twice the size of MGS. For all the talk of how we aren't building huge "battlestar" probes anymore, MRO is nearly the size of the old Mars Observer (2.2 tons vs 2.6 tons).

A typical image wil cover a 6km x 12km footprint, at about 0.25meters/pixel in B&W (red wavelengths), with a color swath along the central 1km of the image (blue-green plus near-IR). That's a 20,000 x 40,000 image! I guess I'll need a bigger monitor.

Anyway, should be pretty awesome once it's in orbit.