The latest observations from NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft,
highlighting water ice distribution and infrared images of the Red
Planet’s surface, are being released this week at the annual meeting
of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
“The Odyssey science mission is going exceptionally well,” said Dr.
Jeffrey Plaut, the Odyssey project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The instrument teams have already
collected a huge volume of data, and the presentations at this
conference are the most extensive and illuminating of the mission so
far.”
In mid-October the frozen carbon dioxide, which seasonally caps Mars’
north pole, evaporated enough to give Odyssey’s scientists their first
chance to look there for ice. “We are really excited about what we are
seeing in the north polar region of Mars. With the seasonal carbon
dioxide frost gone, we can see evidence of massive amounts of water
ice in the soil, even more than we found in the south,” said Dr.
William Boynton, principal investigator for Odyssey’s gamma-ray
spectrometer suite at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
“The infrared and visible images have revealed a wonderful diversity
of surface types and features. Nighttime temperature images show
complex patterns of rock layers, rocky debris, sand and dust produced
by impact cratering, wind erosion and deposition,” said Dr. Philip
Christensen, principal investigator for Odyssey’s thermal-infrared
imaging system at Arizona State University, Tempe. “Color infrared
images of Mars show
variations in rock layers similar to those seen in the layered rocks
of the Grand Canyon. The visible color images show Mars to be a dusty
place, with most of the surface covered by a thin layer of bright
orange-red dust.”
“The Martian Radiation Environment Experiment has observed very
different space weather near Mars than has been seen during the same
period by satellites near Earth,” said Dr. Cary Zeitlin, principal
investigator for that experiment at the National Space Biomedical
Research Institute, Houston. “Variations in space weather are caused
by solar activity, including solar flares. To help us understand these
events, we compare data from Odyssey to data from similar instruments
in orbit around Earth. The recent observations are particularly
exciting because Earth and Mars have been on opposite sides of the
Sun,” he said.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Odyssey mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science in
Washington, D.C. Investigators at Arizona State University in Tempe,
the University of Arizona in Tucson and NASA’s Johnson Space Center,
Houston, operate the science instruments. Additional science partners
are located at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and at Los Alamos
National Laboratories, New Mexico. Lockheed Martin Astronautics,
Denver, the prime contractor for the project, developed and built the
orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin
and from JPL.
Additional information about the 2001 Mars Odyssey is available on the
Internet at:
