| News / Space News |
NASA’s Mars Odyssey Captures Huge Volcano, Nears 100,000 Orbits
NASA’s longest-lived Mars robot marked a new milestone on June 30: 100,000 trips around the Red Planet since launching 23 years ago. During that time, the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter has been mapping minerals and ice across the Martian surface, identifying landing sites for future missions, and relaying data to Earth from NASA’s rovers and landers.
NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this single image of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, on March 11, 2024. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Scientists recently used the orbiter’s camera to take a stunning new image of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system. The image is part of a continuing effort by the Odyssey team to provide high-altitude views of the planet’s horizon. (The first of these views was published in late 2023.)
Similar to the perspective of Earth astronauts get aboard the International Space Station, the view enables scientists to learn more about clouds and airborne dust at Mars.
Taken on March 11, the most recent horizon image captures Olympus Mons in all its glory. With a base that sprawls across 373 miles (600 kilometers), the shield volcano rises to a height of 17 miles (27 kilometers).
“Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” said Odyssey’s project scientist, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”
In addition to offering a freeze frame of clouds and dust, such images, when taken across many seasons, can give scientists a more detailed understanding of the Martian atmosphere.
A bluish-white band at the bottom of the atmosphere hints at how much dust was present at this location during early fall, a period when dust storms typically start kicking up.
The purplish layer above that was likely due to a mixture of the planet’s red dust with some bluish water-ice clouds. Finally, toward the top of the image, a blue-green layer can be seen where water-ice clouds reach up about 31 miles (50 kilometers) into the sky.
Named after Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science-fiction novel “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the orbiter captured the scene with a heat-sensitive camera called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS, which Arizona State University in Tempe built and operates. But because the camera is meant to look down at the surface, getting a horizon shot takes extra planning.
What’s Odyssey secret to being the longest continually active mission in orbit around a planet other than Earth?
“Physics does a lot of the hard work for us,” Sanders said. “But it’s the subtleties we have to manage again and again.”
These variables include fuel, solar power, and temperature. To ensure Odyssey uses its fuel (hydrazine gas) sparingly, engineers have to calculate how much is left since the spacecraft doesn’t have a fuel gauge.
Odyssey relies on solar power to operate its instruments and electronics. This power varies when the spacecraft disappears behind Mars for about 15 minutes per orbit. And temperatures need to stay balanced for all of Odyssey’s instruments to work properly.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
