In Orbit Around Mars? This Is What You Could See

Space.com

NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter has been rotated to capture imagery of the Red Planet that would be similar to what an astronaut would see. Odyssey Deputy Project Scientist Laura Kerber explains.   Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Transcript

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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