It's been a while since I gave a rundown on the upcoming solar system exploration missions so with yesterday's launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, I thought now would be a good time.
I guess it makes sense to start with MRO which blasted off from Cape Canaveral yesterday morning and is now flying a seven month journey to the red planet.
The MRO, a JPL managed project, began in 2002 and the last three years have been spent in design, building, and testing at Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colorado. Lockheed Martin is the primary contractor for the project.
The craft carries six key Mars-facing science intsruments: the HiRISE color telescopic camera will map potential future landing sites at resolutions never before taken from orbit (about three times better than what you see in Google Maps satellite data,) the CTX will take wide-angle black and white images, the CRISM visible and near infrared spectormeter will deliver minerology maps of the surface, the MARCI will take color photographs of the whole planet for tracking changes in weather, the SHARAD will be looking for water up to about 1 km under the surface of Mars, and MCS will measure temperature, pressure, water vapor and dust levels in the Martian atmosphere.
In addition to the six primary instruments, MRO carries two more instruments that will study the Martian atmosphere and Martian gravity as well as two experiments, one designed to test radio communication with crafts as they're landing and one that will photograph Martian moons in an attempt to more accurately determine MRO's orbit and potentially help in future orbital insertions.
MRO also carries the largest antenna ever sent to Mars, one capable of up to 6 Mbit/s, or about what I get from my high speed broadband provider. This capability is about 10 times better than any previous Mars orbiter and will be great for delivering all of the new higher resolution data from MRO as well as acting as a powerful relay for future on-planet assets.
MRO will reach Mars in March of 2006 and will spend nearly six months performing aerobreaking maneuvers to lower the orbit from a very high and elongated one to a 255 x 320 kilometer near-polar orbit. The nominal science operations will bein in November of 2006 and continue for two Earth years (about one Martian year.)
The science that will be conducted during the MRO mission will not only further our understanding of history and distribution of water on the planet, but it will also play a key role in determining prime landing sites and communications relay for future missions including Phoenix Lander and Mars Science Laboratory.
The Phoenix Mars Lander, which received the green light from NASA in June of this year, is the next Mars mission -- to be launched in August of 2007 and arriving in May of 2008. The project will deliver to the Martian arctic a spacecraft developed by Lockheed Martin and inherrited from the cancelled 2001 Mars Surveyor Program. The stationary lander will carry with an improved version of the MERs' Pancam (Panoramic Camera developed by the University of Arizona,) a robotic arm capable of digging small trenches and depositing the slightly sub-surface Martian materials to a chemistry-microscopy instrument (a high-temperature furnace and mass spectrometer) and a very cool small chemistry lab consisting of a wet chemistry laboratory, optical and atomic force microscopes, and a thermal and electrical conductivity probe.
The Phoenix Mars Mission was built to study the history of water on Mars in all of its phases (gas, liquid, and solid) and to search for habitable zones and assess the biologic potential of the Martian ice-soil boundary by looking for complex organic molecules that might be evidence of life. This mission should go a long way in furthering the four goals of NASA's Mars Exploration Program - to determine whether life ever arose on Mars, to characterize the climate of Mars, to characterize the Geology of Mars, and to prepair for human exploration of Mars.
I'd intended to talk a bit about the Mars Science Laboratory but this post is getting long so I'll save that for next time. If you've got questions or corrections, I'd love to hear them in the comments here or via trackbacks.
