NASA's New Mars Orbiter Returns Test Images

March 24, 2006

Erica Hupp
Headquarters, Washington
(202) 358-1237

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(818) 354-6278

RELEASE: 06-106

NASA'S NEW MARS ORBITER RETURNS TEST IMAGES

The first test images of Mars from NASA's newest spacecraft provide a
tantalizing preview of what the orbiter will reveal when its main
science mission begins next fall.

Three cameras on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter were pointed at
Mars at 11:36 p.m. EST, Thursday, while the spacecraft collected 40
minutes of engineering test data. The three cameras are the High
Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, Context Camera and Mars Color
Imager.

"These high resolution images of Mars are thrilling, and unique given
the early morning time-of-day. The final orbit of Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter will be over Mars in the mid-afternoon, like Mars Global
Surveyor and Mars Odyssey," said Alfred McEwen, of the University of
Arizona, Tucson, the principal investigator for the orbiter's High
Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.

"These images provide the first opportunity to test camera settings
and the spacecraft's ability to point the camera with Mars filling
the instruments' field of view," said Steve Saunders, the mission's
program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "The information learned will
be used to prepare for the primary mission next fall." The main
purpose of these images is to enable the camera team to develop
calibration and image-processing procedures such as the precise
corrections needed for color imaging and for high-resolution surface
measurements from stereo pairs of images.

To get desired groundspeeds and lighting conditions for the images,
researchers programmed the cameras to shoot while the spacecraft was
flying about 1,547 miles or more above Mars, nine times the range
planned for the primary science mission. Even so, the highest
resolution of about 8 feet per pixel - an object 8 feet in diameter
would appear as a dot - is comparable to some of the best resolution
previously achieved from Mars orbit.

Further processing of the images during the next week or two is
expected to combine narrow swaths into broader views and show color
in some portions.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been flying in elongated orbits
around Mars since it entered orbit on March 10. Every 35 hours, it
has swung from about 27,000 miles away from the planet to within
about 264 miles of Mars' surface.

Mission operations teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., and at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver,
continue preparing for aerobraking. That process will use about 550
careful dips into the atmosphere during the next seven months to
shrink the orbit to a near-circular shape less than 200 miles above
the ground.

More than 25 gigabits of imaging data, enough to nearly fill five
CD-ROMs, were received through NASA's Deep Space Network station at
Canberra, Australia, and sent to JPL. They were made available to the
camera teams at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary
Laboratory and Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif.

Additional processing has begun for release of other images from the
test in coming days. Preliminary images from the High Resolution
Imaging Science Experiment and additional information about the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter are available online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/mro

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime
contractor for the project and built the spacecraft.

-end-

Looks like another winner for NASA/JPL.

Too bad they had to cancel half of the robotic probes on the drawing
table in order to pay for a manned program in poor shape.

In article .com,
rick++ wrote:
Too bad they had to cancel half of the robotic probes on the drawing
table in order to pay for a manned program in poor shape.

Too bad the unmanned side of the house planned far more missions than it
could afford on a flat budget(*), and then put the icing on the cake by
incurring a couple of billion in cost overruns on JWST and SOFIA.

(* Yeah, they were told they'd get budget increases. How many times do
they have to trip over the same cobblestone before they start watching
where they put their feet? Dan Goldin, for all his flaws, had a point
when he told people that they *had* to start keeping their planning within
their existing budgets, because the expected big increases in later years
never materialize. )
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

Hmmm, I'm looking at the first HiRise image at:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA08061.jpg


Does anyone else notice the unusual distribution of what appear to be
craters?

I haven't looked at this statistically, but it appears that the
"craters" are clustered very close together in some cases -- more so
that an a random distribution would indicate. Could be that I see
color differences as well.

Here's my wild explaination: These crater clusters are volcanic or
thermal vents -- not impact craters.

Comments?