NASA’s Mars rover Odyssey, the longest running mission on Mars, completed its 100,000th orbit around the Red Planet today, the mission team announced. statement.
To celebrate the milestone, the space agency released an exquisite panoramic photo of Olympus Mons, the solar system’s tallest volcano. Odyssey The scene was captured in March. The volcano’s base stretches 373 miles (600 kilometers) across near the Martian equator and rises 17 miles (27 kilometers) into the planet’s thin atmosphere. Earlier this month, astronomers Fleeting Morning Frost For a few hours each day, it will cover the top of the volcano, providing new insights into how polar ice circulates across our arid world.
In Odyssey’s latest volcano images, a pale band skimming Olympus Mons indicates the amount of dust floating in the Martian atmosphere at the time the image was taken, according to NASA. Just above that, a pale purple layer is likely a mix of atmospheric dust and bluish water ice clouds. The blue-green layer at the top of the world shows where the water ice clouds reach about 30 miles (48 kilometers) into the Martian sky, scientists say.
To capture the latest panoramic images, scientists instructed Odyssey to slowly rotate its cameras so they aimed their cameras at the Martian horizon, capturing a view similar to the way residents of the International Space Station see Earth.
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“From the air, Olympus Mons normally appears as a thin ribbon, but with the spacecraft pointed toward the horizon, a single image shows its massive size looming over the landscape,” Odyssey project scientist Jeffrey Prout of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California said in a recent news release. “Not only are these images stunning, they also provide unique science data.”
By taking similar images at different times throughout the year, scientists can study how the Martian atmosphere changes throughout the planet’s four seasons, each lasting between four and seven months.
Scientists say the groundwork for this latest image began in 2008, when another NASA rover, Phoenix, landed on Mars. When the Odyssey rover, which acts as a communications link between the rover and Earth, pointed its antenna at the Mars rover, scientists realized the rover’s cameras could image the Martian horizon.
“We decided to turn on the camera and see what it looked like,” said Steve Sanders, Odyssey’s mission operations spacecraft engineer at Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colo. “Based on these experiments, [the camera’s] When orbiting the Earth, your field of vision extends around the horizon.”
Odyssey was launched in April 2001 and is managed by JPL. It was NASA’s first successful Mars mission after two failures two years earlier. In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter was launched. Burned out A year later, the Mars polar lander was on its way to Mars, where it was disrupted by the Martian atmosphere, after mission engineers made a mistake converting between the two measurement systems. The engine suddenly stops As such, the Odyssey was widely thought of as a redemptive mission.
Odyssey entered Martian orbit in October 2001 and has since discovered previously hidden reservoirs of water ice just beneath the Martian surface that may be within reach of future Mars astronauts. The probe has also mapped vast swaths of Mars’ surface, including its craters, helping astronomers decipher the planet’s history.
The spacecraft recently reached the milestone of 100,000 orbits, meaning it has traveled more than 1.4 billion miles (2.2 billion kilometers). The solar-powered craft has no fuel gauge, so the mission team relies on their mathematical skills to estimate how much fuel is left to sustain the 23-year mission. “The physics do a lot of the heavy lifting for us,” Sanders says. “But you still have to deal with the details a lot of the time.”
Recent calculations suggest Odyssey has about 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of propellant remaining, enough for legacy missions through the end of 2025.
“Continuing the mission for this long while maintaining its historic timeline of scientific planning and execution, as well as innovative engineering approaches, requires careful oversight,” said Joseph Hunt, Odyssey’s project manager at JPL. “We look forward to collecting even more incredible science data in the coming years.”