After 200 days of travel and about 285 million miles, NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft fired its main engine for the first and only time on Oct. 23, putting itself into orbit around the red planet.
Odyssey was launched April 7 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This is the fifth National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission to Mars, and the third to arrive safely, since the 1996 announcement that possible fossilized bacteria was found in a Martian meteorite.
Odyssey will be an important component of NASA's recent study of Mars, explained Professor James Regas of Chico State University's geosciences department, and will pave the way for future missions. NASA's mission is twofold: to discover whether life exists, or has existed, on Mars and to determine what role water has played in the planet's evolution.
Since life as we know it requires the presence of water, Odyssey's survey will focus on the amount and form of water on the planet, Regas said. NASA's latest explorer carries several scientific instruments to map the chemical and mineralogical makeup of Mars: a gamma ray spectrometer that includes a neutron spectrometer and a high-energy neutron detector, a thermal emission imaging system, and a Martian radiation environment experiment.
"The main thing we'll get from the current mission are maps which will tell us the most likely places for life to be on Mars," Regas said. "Then, when we send a rover and a sample return mission to Mars, those will be the places that we'll look."
Odyssey's gamma ray spectrometer will be used to approximate the amount of water and ice currently on or beneath the planet's surface. When high-energy cosmic rays are emitted from the explosion of a sun, they strike a planet's surface and cause a neutron from another particle to collide with hydrogen, Regas explained. When this happens, the hydrogen releases energy in the form of gamma rays that Mars Odyssey can detect.
"The assumption is that the hydrogen, most likely, is tied up with oxygen in water, so the gamma ray spectrometer will allow us to map the distribution of water on the surface of Mars," Regas said.
Odyssey's thermal-emission imaging system will then be used to determine regions of "hot-spot" activity, where ice may have been melted by geothermal heat. These hot spots on the Martian landscape would be the most likely locations for life to be found, Regas said.
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