LOS ANGELES -- A high-resolution camera aboard NASA's latest spacecraft to reach Mars sent back its first view of the Red Planet from orbit, the space agency said Friday.

The crisp test image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was taken late Thursday at an altitude of 1,547 miles and shows a 30.9-mile-by-11.7-mile area of the planet's mid-latitude southern highlands. The mosaic of 10 side-by-side exposures shows a cratered surface with ravine- or canyon-like channels on either side.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that at a resolution of 98 inches per pixel the smallest discernible objects are about three pixels across, and a similar image from the craft's eventual lower orbit will have a resolution of 11 inches per pixel.

The quality bodes well for future pictures to be taken from much closer range, said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.

"The performance of the spacecraft looks superb, there's certainly no obvious smear here," he said in a telephone interview. "They have pointed us and oriented us just right to get unsmeared images."

The spacecraft reached Mars on March 10 and went into a giant elliptical orbit. Over a period of months it will dip into the upper atmosphere in a process called aerobraking to circularize and lower its orbit to altitudes between about 199 miles and 158 miles. The science phase of the $720 million mission should begin in November.

McEwen described the camera's first image as very sharp with a high signal-to-noise ratio. When the spacecraft is in its final "mapping orbit," the spatial resolution will be nine times higher, he said.

The first image is comparable in resolution to those from the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 1997, McEwen said.

"But there are very few MOC images over this particular region of Mars, so it's the highest resolution over most of the area covered here," he said. "It's also unique in that this is early morning, where as MOC is in a 2 p.m. in the afternoon orbit, so we have very different illumination conditions which accentuate different topographic facets."

The main purpose of initial images, however, is to calibrate the camera, which has 10 side-by-side charge-coupled devices, or optical sensors.

"We will develop techniques to do precision geometric corrections, which is very important to us for when we do stereo imaging with two images at different angles in order to derive very high-resolution topographic data sets," McEwen said.

Two other cameras on the orbiter, the Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager, were also tested Thursday night during a 40-minute collection of engineering data.

On the Net:

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/