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NASA Spacecraft Begins Five-Year Mars Mission

13 March 2006

Main goal of science program is to find planet's water history

By Cheryl Pellerin
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington – With a crucially timed firing of its main engines March 10, NASA's new spacecraft with a five-year mission to Mars put itself into orbit around the red planet.

The spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), will provide more science data than all previous Mars missions combined.

Cheers and applause erupted in the control rooms at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Colorado when scientists received signals from the spacecraft after it emerged from a tense 30 minutes of radio silence during its first pass behind Mars.

"Our spacecraft has finally become an orbiter," said JPL's Jim Graf, MRO project manager, during a briefing at JPL just after the successful orbit insertion.

"The celebration feels great,” he added, “but it will be very brief because before we start our main science phase, we still have six months of challenging work to adjust the orbit to the right size and shape."

The spacecraft traveled about 500 million kilometers to reach Mars after its launch from Florida in August 2005.

It used its main thrusters as it neared the planet to slow itself enough for Mars' gravity to capture it.

For the next six months, the mission will use hundreds of carefully calculated dips into Mars' atmosphere in a process called aerobraking.  This will shrink its orbit from the elongated ellipse it is now flying to a nearly circular two-hour orbit.

For the mission's principal science phase, scheduled to begin in November, the orbit is a nearly circular loop ranging from 320 kilometers to 255 kilometers in altitude, lower than any previous Mars orbiter.

To go directly into such an orbit instead of using aerobraking, the mission would have needed to carry about 70 percent more fuel when it launched.

The instruments on MRO will examine the planet from this low-altitude orbit.

A spectrometer will map water-related minerals in patches as small as a baseball infield. A radar instrument will probe for underground layers of rock and water.

One telescopic camera will resolve features as small as a card table. Another will put the highest-resolution images into broader context.

A color camera will monitor the entire planet daily for changes in weather. A radiometer will check each layer of the atmosphere for variations in temperature, water vapor and dust.

The missions now at Mars – including NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003 and still operating on the Martian surface, and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission, in orbit since 2003 – have advanced knowledge about the presence and history of water on Mars, said JPL project scientist Richard Zurek.

One of the MRO main goals is to decipher when water was on the surface and where it is now.

"Water is essential for life,” he added, “so that will help focus future studies of whether Mars has ever supported life."

The orbiter can radio data to Earth at up to 10 times the rate of any previous Mars mission.

Besides sending home pictures and other information from its own investigations, MRO will relay data from surface missions, including NASA's Phoenix Mars Scout scheduled for launch in 2007 and Mars Science Laboratory in development for 2009.

Information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is available on NASA’s Web site at http://www.nasa.gov/mro and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)