Mars Odyssey Image: South Pole Neutron View

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NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft provided this view of the south pole of Mars in intermediate-energy, or epithermal, neutrons. Soil enriched in hydrogen is indicated by the deep blue colors on the map, where a low intensity of epithermal neutrons is found. The view shown here of the south pole of Mars comes from measurements made during th2Ä1hrst week of Mars Odyssey’s mapping, in February 2002, using the neutron spectrometer instrument.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey
mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The neutron spectrometer
was supplied by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M., and is one of
the instruments in the gamma ray spectrometer instrument suite, which was supplied
by the University of Arizona, Tucson. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the
prime contractor for the project, and developed and built the orbiter.
See http://grs.lpl.arizona.edu for more information. Odyssey mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona