NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft, the longest mission to Mars, circled the Red Planet for the 100,000th time today, the mission team announced in a STATEMENT.
To celebrate the milestone, the space agency released an intricate panorama of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system; Odyssey captured the view in March. The base of the volcano lies 373 miles (600 kilometers) near the Martian equator, while rising 17 miles (27 kilometers) into the planet’s thin air. Earlier this month, astronomers discovered transient morning frost covering the summit of the volcano for several hours each day, providing new insights into how ice from the poles circulates throughout the parched world.
In Odyssey’s latest volcano image, the bluish-white streak seen grazing Olympus Mons shows the amount of dust floating in the Martian air when the image was taken, according to NASA. The thin layer of purple just above likely hints at a mixture of atmospheric dust with bluish water-ice clouds. The blue-green layer at the top of the world marks where water-ice clouds reach up to about 30 miles (48 kilometers) into the Martian sky, scientists say.
To capture the latest panorama, scientists ordered Odyssey to rotate slowly so that its camera pointed toward the Martian horizon, capturing views similar to the kind that residents of the International Space Station get from Earth.
Connected: The giant Martian mountain Olympus Mons may once have been a volcanic island
“Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon, we can see in a single image just how big it looks over the landscape,” Jeffrey Plaut, who is the project scientist for Odyssey at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, according to the latest news release. “Not only is the image spectacular, but it also provides us with unique scientific data.”
By taking similar images at different times of the year, scientists can study how the Martian atmosphere changes during the planet’s four seasons, which last four to seven months each.
Scientists say the basis for the latest image dates back to 2008, when another NASA mission called Phoenix landed on Mars. When Odyssey, which served as a communication link between Earth and Earth, pointed its antenna toward Earth, scientists noticed that its camera was able to see the Martian horizon.
“We just decided to turn on the camera and see what it looked like,” said Steve Sanders, who serves as the Odyssey mission’s spacecraft engineer at Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado. “Based on those experiments, we created a sequence that holds [the camera’s] field of vision centered on the horizon as we orbit the planet.”
The Odyssey mission was launched in April 2001 and is managed by JPL. It was NASA’s first successful mission to Mars after a pair of failures two years earlier. In 1998, it is said that the Mars Climatic Orbiter BURNED in the Martian atmosphere after mission engineers messed up the translations between the two measurement systems. A year later, the Mars Polar Lander crashed into the Martian surface because of it engine shuts off suddenly before landing. Therefore, the Odyssey was widely seen as a mission of redemption.
Odyssey slipped into orbit around Mars in October 2001 and has since discovered previously hidden reservoirs of ice beneath the planet’s surface that may be within reach of future Mars astronauts. The spacecraft also mapped large parts of the planet’s surface, including its craters, which have helped astronomers decipher the history of Mars.
The spacecraft’s milestone of 100,000 orbits means it has covered over 1.4 billion miles (2.2 billion kilometers). The solar-powered spacecraft doesn’t have a fuel gauge, so the mission team relies on their math skills to estimate the remaining fuel that keeps the 23-year mission running. “Physics does a lot of the hard work for us,” Sanders said. “But it’s the subtleties that we have to manage again and again.”
The latest calculations suggest that Odyssey has about 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of propellant left, which is enough to extend the legacy mission until the end of 2025.
“It takes careful monitoring to sustain a mission this long while maintaining a historic timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices,” said Joseph Hunt, Odyssey’s project manager at JPL. “We look forward to collecting more great science in the years to come.”