00:00 Imagine you're an astronaut in the International Space Station.
00:03 Roger, and you're a lot clearer here also.
00:05 But, instead of being in orbit around Earth, you're in orbit around Mars.
00:10 I work for NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter,
00:13 and we just took a bunch of new images that show exactly how the planet Mars would look
00:18 from that exact same perspective.
00:20 If you were an astronaut, the first thing that would catch your eye are all of these beautiful craters,
00:29 which of course look much different than what you would see on Earth.
00:32 But the second thing you would see, because you're looking at the planet from an angle,
00:35 is the structure in these beautiful clouds.
00:38 And, because Mars Odyssey has a heat vision camera,
00:41 it can actually tell the difference between different kinds of clouds.
00:45 On Mars we have CO2 ice clouds, we have water ice clouds, and we have dust clouds.
00:51 In order to get these images, we had to do something with the spacecraft that we've never done before.
00:56 Usually, our camera faces straight down for mapping.
00:59 In the past, we've experimented with rolling the spacecraft out
01:03 so that we can catch pictures of some of Mars' moons, like Phobos,
01:07 a potato-shaped beautiful moon that you might have heard of.
01:10 But this time, we had to do something a little more extreme.
01:13 We had to rotate the spacecraft all the way to the horizon,
01:16 then we had to keep it that way for an entire orbit.
01:19 Odyssey has been going strong for 22 years.
01:22 We have ignition and liftoff, carrying NASA on an Odyssey back to Mars.
01:27 That makes it the longest-lasting spacecraft that has ever been sent to visit Mars.
01:33 So what's next for Odyssey?
01:35 Well, next year we're going to hit 100,000 orbits around Mars.
01:39 We also have several ongoing science campaigns.
01:42 One is a rock mapping campaign that will help us land future missions more safely on the surface.
01:47 We're also taking advantage of our special Dawn/Dusk orbit to map clouds, fog,
01:52 and frost that only exist at certain times of day.
01:55 And we are also planning our next maneuver to look out at the clouds on the horizon again.
02:01 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
02:06 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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