A portion of the first full-resolution image returned by MRO. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Click to enlarge.
After years of development and months of spaceflight, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is beginning to return photos of the Red Planet. The spacecraft pointed three of its cameras at the surface of Mars on Thursday, and started snapping pictures. This photo was taken when the spacecraft was at an altitude of 2,489 kilometers (1,547 miles), which is about 9 times as high as its final orbit – the pictures are going to just get better. Even so, the resolution at this altitude is about the same as the best pictures returned by other Mars orbiters.
The first test images of Mars from NASA’s newest spacecraft provide a tantalizing preview of what the orbiter will reveal when its main science mission begins next fall.
Three cameras on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter were pointed at Mars at 8:36 p.m. PST Thursday, while the spacecraft collected 40 minutes of engineering test data. The cameras are the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, the Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager.
“These high-resolution images of Mars are thrilling, and unique given the early morning time-of-day. The final orbit of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be over Mars in the mid-afternoon, like Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey,” said Alfred McEwen, University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.
“These images provide the first opportunity to test camera settings and the spacecraft’s ability to point the camera with Mars filling the instruments’ field of view,” said Steve Saunders, the mission’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters. “The information learned will be used to prepare for the primary mission next fall.” The main purpose of these images is to enable the camera team to develop calibration and image-processing procedures such as the precise corrections needed for color imaging and for high-resolution surface measurements from stereo pairs of images.
To get desired groundspeeds and lighting conditions for the test images, researchers programmed the cameras to shoot while the spacecraft was flying about 2,489 kilometers (1,547 miles) or more above Mars’ surface, about nine times the range planned for the orbiter’s primary science mission. Even so, the highest resolution of about 2.5 meters (8 feet) per pixel – an object 8 feet in diameter would appear as a dot — is comparable to some of the best resolution previously achieved from Mars orbit.
Further processing of the images during the next week or two is expected to combine narrow swaths into broader views and show color in some portions.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been flying in elongated orbits around Mars since it entered orbit on March 10. Every 35 hours, it has swung about 44,000 kilometers (27,000 miles) away from the planet then come back within about 425 kilometers (264 miles) of Mars’ surface.
Mission operations teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif, and at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, continue preparing for aerobraking. That process will use about 550 careful dips into the atmosphere during the next seven months to shrink the orbit to a near-circular shape less than 300 kilometers (200 miles) above the ground.
More than 25 gigabits of imaging data, enough to nearly fill five CD-ROMs, were received through NASA’s Deep Space Network station at Canberra, Australia, and sent to JPL. They were made available to the camera teams at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif.
Preliminary images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and additional information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mro or http://HiRISE.lpl.arizona.edu
Additional processing has begun for release of other images from the test in coming days.
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JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft.
Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release