For two decades, the longest-lived spacecraft on the red planet has helped locate water ice, assess landing sites, and study the planet’s mysterious moons.
NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft was launched 20 years ago on April 7, making it the oldest spacecraft still operating on the red planet. The orbiter, named after Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Clarke has blessed its use before release), was sent to map the orbiter. composition of the Martian surface, providing a window into the past so that scientists could unite the evolution of the planet.
But much more is being done than that, discovering the remnants of water ice, which serve as a crucial communications link for other spacecraft, and which help pave the way not only for safer landings, but also for future ones. astronauts.
Here is a partial list of Odyssey’s many successes.
Martian ice mapping
The two decades of Odyssey data have been a fortune for researchers working to determine where the water ice on the planet is locked. Understanding the water cycle on Mars, a planet that was once much wetter, like Earth, provides information about how it has changed over time: how does water move around the planet today? Does the inclination of the planet affect where the ice is stable? Odyssey’s discoveries have helped solve these questions.
“Before Odyssey, we didn’t know where this water was stored on the planet,” said project scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which runs the Odyssey mission. “We first detected it from orbit and later confirmed it was there with the Phoenix lander.”
Water ice stores are also needed to help astronauts survive on Mars and to provide fuel to their spacecraft. (In fact, astronauts were the focus of an instrument aboard the Odyssey that measured what space radiation they would have to fight before they stopped working in 2003.) The orbiter finds water ice using its detector. of gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS), which has proven to be a near-surface hydrogen-capable hunter, a substitute for water ice. The GRS measures the number of different elements on the Martian surface and also serves as a node in NASA’s interplanetary gamma-ray burst (GRB) detection network, which identifies the GRB’s source locations for tracking astronomical observations. .
What is Mars made of?
Look at just about any cartographic study of the Martian surface and it probably includes Odyssey data. For many years, the most complete global maps of Mars were made using Odyssey’s infrared camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS. The camera measures surface temperature day and night, allowing scientists to determine what physical materials, such as rock, sand, or dust, exist. Their data reveal the presence of these materials depending on how they are heated or cooled during a Martian day.
The net effect of all this two-decade mapping? Scientists have not only used the data to map networks of valleys and craters, but have also been able to detect sandstone, iron-rich rocks, salts and more: findings that help give a deeper insight into the history of Mars. “It’s hard to overstate how THEMIS’s global map has filled the gaps in our knowledge,” said Laura Kerber of JPL, an assistant scientist on the Odyssey project.
Safer landings
THEMIS has sent more than a million images since it began circling Mars. The images and maps that are produced highlight the presence of hazards, such as topographic features and pebbles, but also help ensure the safety of future astronauts by showing the location of resources such as water ice. This helps the Mars and NASA scientific community decide where to send landers and rovers, including the Perseverance rover, which touched down on February 18, 2021.
Routine calls at home
From the very beginning, Odyssey has served as a long-distance call center for NASA rovers and landers, sending their data to Earth as part of the Mars relay network. The idea of the relief of Mars dates back to the 1970s, when the two Viking landers sent scientific data and images through an orbiter to Earth. An orbiter can carry radios or antennas capable of sending more data than a surface spacecraft. But Odyssey did the routine process when it began transmitting data to and from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
“When the twin rovers landed, the success of relaying data via UHF frequency was a game changer,” said Chris Potts of JPL, Odyssey’s mission director.
Every day, rovers could go to a new place and send new images to Earth. Through a relay like Odyssey, scientists obtained more data earlier, while the public got more images of Mars to get excited. Odyssey has supported more than 18,000 relay sessions. He currently shares the task of communicating with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN, along with ESA (European Space Agency) Trace Gas Orbiter.
Sweet colored moons
Odyssey has done such a thorough job of studying the Martian surface that scientists have begun rotating their THEMIS camera to capture unique views of the moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos. As with the Martian surface, studying the thermophysics of each moon helps scientists determine the properties of materials on their surfaces. This information can be provided sightings in its past: it is unclear whether the moons are asteroids or captured pieces of Mars, ripped from the surface by an ancient impact.
Future missions, such as the Japanese Space Agency’s MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) spacecraft, will attempt to land on these moons. In the distant future, missions could even create bases on them for astronauts. And if they do, they will be based on data from an orbiter that began its odyssey at the beginning of the millennium.
THEMIS was built and operated by Arizona State University in Tempe. Odyssey’s gamma-ray spectrometer was provided by the University of Arizona, Tucson, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Russian Space Research Institute. The main contractor for the Odyssey project, Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, developed and built the orbit. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena.
For more information on Odyssey, visit:
https://mars.nasa.gov/odyssey/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/odyssey/index.html
News media contacts
Andrew Good
Reaction Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433
[email protected]