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NASA's Mars Exploration Orbiter Ready for Launch

10 August 2005

Mission will look for landing sites, relay communications to Earth

Washington -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is scheduled for an August 11 morning launch and will arrive at Mars in March 2006 for a mission to understand the planet's water riddles and advance exploration of the mysterious red planet.

MRO observations will also support future Mars missions by examining potential landing sites and providing a communications relay between the Martian surface and Earth.

The original launch, set for August 10, was postponed because of a failure of a gyro unit at the manufacturer. Two such units are part of the flight control system on the Atlas V launch vehicle at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The engineering team is evaluating whether the failure that occurred in the testing at the manufacturer has any affect on other gyro units in the MRO's Atlas V. Other launch windows are available each morning through August.

The planets move into good position to launch trips from Earth to Mars for only a short period every 26 months. The best launch position is when Earth is about to overtake Mars in their concentric racing lanes around the Sun.

"We have a big spacecraft loaded with advanced instruments for inspecting Mars in greater detail than any previous orbiter,” said NASA Mars Exploration Program Director Doug McCuistion, “and we have the first Atlas V launch vehicle to carry an interplanetary mission.”

When MRO arrives at Mars in March, it begins a half-year "aerobraking" process. Aerobraking is a technique used by spacecraft in which it uses drag in a planetary atmosphere to reduce its velocity relative to the planet.

The MRO will gradually adjust the shape of its orbit by using friction created by carefully calculated dips into the top of the Martian atmosphere. MRO's primary science phase starts in November 2006.

"Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will give us several times more data about Mars than all previous missions combined," said James Graf, mission project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Researchers will use the data to study the history and distribution of Martian water. Learning more about what has happened to the water will focus searches for possible past or present Martian life.

The craft can transmit about 10 times as much data per minute as any previous Mars spacecraft. This will help convey detailed observations of the Martian surface, subsurface and atmosphere by instruments on the orbiter and enable data relay from other landers on the Martian surface to Earth.

NASA plans to launch the Phoenix Mars Scout in 2007 to land on the far northern Martian surface. NASA is also developing an advanced rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, for launch in 2009.

Additional information on the MRO is available on NASA’s Web site.

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)