NASA’s Odyssey marks 20 yrs of mapping Martian surface

 

 

DO YOU know that a NASA spacecraft launched 20 years ago is still working at the Red Planet? For two decades, the longest-lived spacecraft at the Red Planet, 2001 Mars Odyssey, has helped locate water ice, assess landing sites, and study the planet’s mysterious moons, NASA said. Launched 20 years ago on April 7, the orbiter, which takes its name from Arthur C Clarke’s classic sci-fi novel “2001: A Space Odyssey”, was sent to map the composition of the Martian surface, providing a window to the past so scientists could piece together how the planet evolved. But it has done far more than that, uncovering troves of water ice, serving as a crucial communications link for other spacecraft, and helping to pave the way not just for safer landings but also future astronauts.

 

Odyssey’s two decades of data have been a boon for researchers working to determine where water ice is locked up on the planet. “Before Odyssey, we didn’t know where this water was stored on the planet,” Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the Odyssey mission, said in a statement. “We detected it for the first time from orbit and later confirmed it was there using the Phoenix lander.”

 

The orbiter finds the water ice using its gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) detector, which has proven to be a capable hunter of near-surface hydrogen -- a proxy for water ice. For many years, the most complete global maps of Mars were made using Odyssey’s infrared camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.