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

00:00Imagine you're an astronaut in the International Space Station.

00:03Roger, and you're allowed to clear here also.

00:05But instead of being in orbit around Earth, you're in orbit around Mars.

00:10I work for NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter,

00:13and we just took a bunch of new images that show exactly how the planet Mars would look

00:18from that exact same perspective.

00:24If you were an astronaut, the first thing that would catch your eye are all of these beautiful craters,

00:29which of course look much different than what you would see on Earth.

00:32But the second thing you would see, because you're looking at the planet from an angle,

00:35is the structure in these beautiful clouds.

00:38And because Mars Odyssey has a heat vision camera,

00:41it can actually tell the difference between different kinds of clouds.

00:45On Mars we have CO2 ice clouds, we have water ice clouds, and we have dust clouds.

00:51In order to get these images, we had to do something with the spacecraft that we've never done before.

00:56Usually our camera faces straight down for mapping.

00:59In the past, we've experimented with rolling the spacecraft out

01:03so that we can catch pictures of some of Mars' moons, like Phobos,

01:07a potato-shaped beautiful moon that you might have heard of.

01:10But this time we had to do something a little more extreme.

01:13We had to rotate the spacecraft all the way to the horizon,

01:16then we had to keep it that way for an entire orbit.

01:19Odyssey has been going strong for 22 years.

01:22We have ignition and liftoff, carrying NASA on an Odyssey back to Mars.

01:27That makes it the longest lasting spacecraft that has ever been sent to visit Mars.

01:33So what's next for Odyssey?

01:35Well, next year we're going to hit 100,000 orbits around Mars.

01:39We also have several ongoing science campaigns.

01:42One is a rock mapping campaign that will help us land future missions more safely on the surface.

01:48We're also taking advantage of our special Dawn-Dusk orbit

01:51to map clouds, fog, and frost that only exist at certain times a day.

01:55And we are also planning our next maneuver to look out at the clouds on the horizon again.

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