LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Reconnaissance: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a little over a year away from its date with destiny, when it will ride atop a rocket into space, bound for the Red Planet. After arriving at Mars, the orbiter will "follow the water" like other NASA missions to Mars, spending several years collecting a treasure trove of data about martian geology, mineralogy, and climate. This is the first of three articles about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Stay tuned for the other two.
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The HiRISE camera, orbiting the red planet on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet. It is operated at The University of Arizona in Tucson. HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and his team released the new image of the dark pit on Arsia Mons and several other stunning images today on the HiRISE Web site.
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has completed aerobraking and its primary science phase will soon begin in earnest. MRO’s Project Scientist and members of the Navigation Team discuss the intricacies and challenges of aerobraking in Mars’ ever-changing atmosphere. Aerobraking is a technique that was first used by the Magellan mission to Venus in 1993, and ... used on two other Mars missions, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) in 1997 and Mars Odyssey (2001). Aerobraking uses repeated dips into the atmosphere to gradually slow the spacecraft and reduce the size of the orbit. While aerobraking takes time, it saves on the amount fuel required, as in MRO’s case, by 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds). To aid in the aerobraking process, the navigation team employs an atmospheric model called the Mars-GRAM (Global Reference Atmospheric Model), a computer database of information from what previous missions have encountered, combined with a mathematical model that attempts to simulate Mars’ atmospheric dynamics.
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With the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop, an Atlas V launch vehicle, 19 stories tall, with a two-ton Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on top, roars away from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:43 a.m. EDT. All systems performed nominally for NASA's first launch of an Atlas V on an interplanetary mission. MRO established radio contact with controllers 61 minutes after launch and within four minutes of separation from the upper stage. Initial contact came through an antenna at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan. Mars is 72 million miles from Earth today, but the spacecraft will travel more than four times that distance on its outbound-arc trajectory to intercept the red planet on March 10, 2006. The orbiter carries six scientific instruments for examining the surface, atmosphere and subsurface of Mars in unprecedented detail from low orbit.
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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) began the six-month aerobraking phase with rehearsals or drag passes last Friday and tomorrow night the spacecraft will dip down for its first "taste" of the Red Planet's atmosphere. "We're putting the spacecraft through its paces," said Peter Xaypraseuth, MRO flight engineer in an interview with The Planetary Society earlier today. "We're telling it to do the exact things it would be doing for each upcoming aerobraking pass, except that we're actually not going to be touching or sensing the atmosphere. It's kind of a mock rehearsal." In other words, everything is real, he said, "except the altitude."
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This artist's concept of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter features the spacecraft's main bus facing down, toward the red planet. The large silver circular feature above the spacecraft bus is the high-gain antenna, the spacecraft's main means of communicating with both Earth and other spacecraft. The long, thin pole behind the bus is the SHARAD antenna. Seeking liquid or frozen water, SHARAD will probe the subsurface using radar waves at a 15-25 MHz frequency band, "seeing" in the first few hundreds of feet (up to 1 kilometer) of Mars' crust. The large instrument (covered in black thermal blanketing) in the center is the HiRISE camera. This powerful camera will provide the highest-resolution images from orbit to date.
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