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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