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The Mars Odyssey: The New and Improved Mission to Mars by Adam Frank for McGraw-Hill We're back, and this time, hopefully, everything will work as planned. After an eight-month trip through deep space, the Mars Odyssey probe has finally arrived at the Red Planet. Now we wait and hold our collective breath. There are thousand-year-old questions on that planet and we may be close to getting some answers. After a nearly two year hiatus, humanity has once again successfully gotten a robotic messenger to Mars. Once again, the curiosity that defines humans as a species has led us to blast a hunk of metal, plastic and human intelligence across 60 billion miles of space. This mission, like many before, is to map, probe, study and help us understand how close this other world might have come to harboring life. Mars holds a special place in the imagination of astronomers and the general public alike. No other planet has been the subject of such intense debate concerning the suitability for life. No other planet has given us such tantalizing clues that life might have existed or even still exists. The Mars Odyssey was launched in April 2001, and has spent most of its life tearing through interstellar space at almost 68,000 miles per hour ever since. On October 21, 2001, it successfully used its retro-rockets to slow down enough to drop into orbit. As usual with space exploration, the Odyssey's mission is a mix of technical mastery and crossed fingers. In spite of its enduring interest to humans, Mars has not proven to be a willing subject of study. Mars has been the target of more missions than any other extraterrestrial object in the solar system other than our own (very nearby) moon. While many spacecraft made it close to the Red Planet, finishing the job they were sent for (exploration) has not been easy. Since 1960 there have been 30 missions to Mars attempted by three different countries. Not even one-third of these have succeeded. Odyssey is the first attempt by NASA to explore the planet after two very embarrassing and very public failures in 1999. In both cases, human errors where determined to be the cause of the $100 million dollar losses. According to NASA, the Odyssey team has pulled out all the stops to ensure that this time all relevant lessons were learned from the previous failures as well as successes (i.e. Pathfinder). The primary goal of the Odyssey mission will be to search for water on the Red Planet. Over the last 10 years, images from other Martian probes have shown what appear to be dry river channels or other surface features that could have been formed by freely running water. Recently, images of giant Martian canyon walls show what could be run-off from water that flowed (or still flows) from sub-surface sources. However, these images are not proof that water exists. They do offer hints that are fabulously intriguing. Water is the key ingredient for life and many scientists feel the presence of liquid water on a planet is THE necessary first step for forming and sustaining organisms. Orbiting the planet for a full Martian year (917 days) Odyssey will use different kinds of instruments to probe below the Martian surface looking for evidence of water. One experiment uses an on-board Gamma ray detector to sense sub-surface hydrogen atoms (presumably in large water deposits). High-resolution thermal cameras will map temperature variations on the Martian surface, a technique that has proven enormously valuable in studying the Earth's underground supply of water as well as minerals. There is so much to be learned from this mission and we now are so close. We, and Odyssey, are not there yet. In the months ahead, Odyssey will continue surfing the atmosphere in a process called "aerobraking"- using drag to turn the long elliptical orbit it started on into a shorter two-hour circular orbit at an altitude of about 250 miles. There is still a lot that could go wrong. So far, however, a lot has gone right. That is good. Each of these steps into space takes us closer to our future and an understanding of our origins. In the longest term, what happens to this little space craft may carry more weight than many of the urgencies now living on the front page. Questions to Ponder
Where is the Mars Odyssey Right Now?
What is Aerobraking?
Mars Pathfinder
Life on Mars
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