A key aspect of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Extended Mission is the opportunity to turn the spacecraft and point the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) at specific features of interest. A chance to point the spacecraft comes about ten times a week. Throughout the Primary Mission (March 1999 – January 2001), nearly all MGS operations were conducted with the spacecraft pointing “nadir” — that is, straight down. In this orientation, opportunities to hit a specific small feature of interest were in some cases rare, and in other cases non-existant.
May 23rd, 2001
Mars Odyssey fine-tunes its trajectory to the Red Planet Spaceflight Now
NASA’s Mars-bound Odyssey space probe tweaked its flight path on Wednesday with the first in a series of planned trajectory correction maneuvers. Odyssey fired its thrusters for 82 seconds at 1:30 p.m. EDT, changing the craft’s velocity by 3.6 meters per second (8.1 miles per hour).
February 6th, 2001
Secrets of the Martian Noachian Highlands Spaceflight Now
Among the most exciting places that the Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera has photographed during its three and a half years in orbit has been this crater in central Noachis Terra.
February 6th, 2001
Spectacular layers of Mars exposed in Becquerel Crater Spaceflight Now
Toward the end of its Primary Mapping Mission, Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) acquired one of its most spectacular pictures of layered sedimentary rock exposed within the ancient crater Becquerel. Pictures such as this one from January 25, 2001, underscore the fact that you never know from one day to the next what the next MOC images will uncover.
February 4th, 2001
Sand dunes appear as sharks’ teeth in Mars crater Spaceflight Now
Sometimes, pictures received from Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera are “just plain pretty.” This image, taken in early September 2000, shows a group of sand dunes at the edge of a much larger field of dark-toned dunes in Proctor Crater.
February 3rd, 2001
Take a peek at the Red Planet’s fretted terrain Spaceflight Now
Martian “fretted terrain” occurs in regions of buttes and mesas that stand at the erosional margin where northern low-lying plains meet the higher-standing cratered uplands. Found mostly in the mid-northern latitudes, some of the best examples of fretted terrain occur in Deuteronilus Mensae.
February 2nd, 2001
European mission to Mars on schedule for 2003 launch Spaceflight Now
Initial assembly on Europe’s Mars Express mission is complete, leaving the craft’s basic structure ready for a barrage of tests through the next month. Mars Express is due for a June 2003 launch toward Mars, where it will enter orbit around the red planet.
February 2nd, 2001
What’s that? Probe sees strange surfaces on Mars Spaceflight Now
Sometimes Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) images show things that look very bizzare. Unique among the MOC images is a suite of pictures from northwestern Hellas Planitia.
December 28th, 2000
Martian water may be ice in planet’s interior Spaceflight Now
Liquid water that once flowed on the surface of Mars could now be locked up deep in the planet’s interior as an unusual form of ice, scientists reported earlier this month. In a paper published in the journal Nature December 14, Craig Bina of Northwestern University and Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California at Davis said that water could be transported into the interiors of terrestrial planets, including the Earth and Mars, as “ice VII”, a rare, dense form of water ice that forms at high pressures and low temperatures.
December 17th, 2000
Magnetic field ‘umbrellas’ shield Martian atmosphere Spaceflight Now
Though Mars lacks a global protective magnetic shield like that of the Earth, strong localized magnetic fields embedded in the crust appear to be a significant barrier to erosion of the atmosphere by the solar wind. This conclusion by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, emerges from a new map of the limits of the planet’s ionosphere obtained by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which was launched in 1996 and reached the planet 10 months later. The new data show that where localized surface magnetic fields are strong, the ionosphere reaches to a higher altitude, indicating that the solar wind is being kept at bay.