Set To Enter Martian Orbit March 10
One week from Friday, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
is expected to begin orbiting the Red Planet, after a seven-month
journey from Earth. The probe was launched August 12,
2005.
The $720 million space probe will fire its braking engines for
27 minutes at precisely 4:24 pm MST March 10, beginning its
maneuver that, hopefully, will slow the aircraft enough that the
planet's gravity will pull it into orbit. Should the engines not
fire as designed, the school-bus-sized spacecraft will shoot past
Mars, it's mission over.
"Mars doesn't treat you very well, for the most part," said Doug
McCuistion, NASA's Mars exploration program director, to the Rocky
Mountain News. "So this is a very challenging thing to do."
Indeed, NASA has a 65 percent success rate at putting spacecraft
into Mars orbit; nearly a third of all attempts have failed.
That's not meant to assume something will go amiss with the MRO;
after all, NASA is riding a recent winning streak with its
interplanetary missions. After all, isn't it harder to maneuver a spacecraft into the path of the
tail of a comet 242 million miles from Earth -- and
return it successfully?
Unlike the Stardust probe, however, the most crucial portion of
the MRO's mission will be conducted out of NASA's sight -- the last
nine minutes of the MRO's braking maneuver will happen on the far
side of Mars, meaning the orbiter will be out of radar contact for
approximately 30 minutes. Scientists on the ground won't know if
the MRO was successfully captured by Mars' gravity until
communications are reestablished.
Should all go to plan, the MRO will join two other probes in
orbit around the Red Planet: the Mars Global Surveyor, launched in
1996, and Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001. Both have been resounding
successes, completing a combined 50,000+ orbits around Mars.
Before those probes, however, NASA's Mars Observer and Mars
Climate Orbiter were, ah, not so successful. The Observer vanished
before it was to have entered orbit in 1993.
In 1999, the Climate Orbiter burned in the Martian atmosphere
during its orbital braking maneuver, after it came too close to the
Red Planet. The problem was later determined to be caused by
engineers who programmed the spacecraft in English units, and not
metric.
Scientists expect the MRO to fare much better.
"The team is trained and confident. The spacecraft systems are
healthy and performing as expected, and we're looking forward to
adding MRO to the (spacecraft) constellation at Mars," said Bob
Berry, director of space exploration systems at Lockheed
Martin.
MRO is larger than most of its predecessors, and is expected to
return five times more data than all of them combined. It carries
the HiRISE camera onboard, the most powerful telescopic camera ever
sent to another planet.
Aero-News will bring our readers Real-Time updates of the
spacecraft's progress. Stay tuned!