MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Mars Polar Lander Mission Status
October 30, 1999
NASA’s Mars Polar Lander spacecraft successfully fired its
thrusters for 12 seconds this morning to fine-tune its flight
path for arrival at the Martian south pole on December 3.
Flight controllers said the spacecraft performed as planned
and that preliminary data show the desired trajectory change was
achieved. The thruster firing began at 10:28 a.m. Pacific
Daylight Time. Previous thruster firings were accomplished on
January 21, March 15, and September 1. The next thruster firing
is scheduled for November 30.
The landing site is located at 76 degrees south latitude
and 195 degrees west longitude, near the northern edge of the
layered terrain in the vicinity of the Martian south pole. The
lander is now about 14.3 million kilometers (about 8.9 million
miles) from Mars, traveling at a speed of 4.8 kilometers per
second (about 10,700 miles per hour) relative to Mars. The
spacecraft is about 228 million kilometers (about 142 million
miles) from Earth, and has traveled along an arcing flight path
of about 690 million kilometers (about 429 million miles)
through space since launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on
January 3, 1999.
For more information on the mission, see
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/marsnews/.
Mars Polar Lander is managed for NASA’s Office of Space
Science by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is a division of
the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.
