There was much cooing in the Nature office this morning. Not over news of our colleague’s new baby, but over these pictures of Martian moon Phobos.

The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped these pictures of Phobos on March 23.

“Images from previous spacecraft have been of smaller pixel scale …, but the HiRISE images have greater signal-to-noise, making the new data some of the best ever for Phobos,” says the team behind the shots (see more photos here).

If you want to get involved you will soon be able to suggest where HiRISE should be pointed next, on the NASA website.

The Bad Astronomy blog highlights some more of the good stuff that HiRISE has come up with:

The crater Stickney on the right is huge compared to the moon; if the impactor had been any bigger or moving faster it would have shattered the moon. The long parallel grooves were probably formed as stress fractures in the impact. Check out the awesome image of the crater itself. Wow.

And if that’s not enough, pull out your red/green glasses and take a gander at the 3D anaglyph they made. The tiny craters really stand out… uh, I mean, stand in. Whatever. They’re cool, so take a look.

Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona