LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Reconnaissance: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
built 636 days ago
When NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reaches the Red Planet next month, it will immediately seek out areas where water once flowed, try to identify habitats where ancient life might have thrived, and start mapping the entire planet in unprecedented detail. But the orbiter's arrival at Mars will ... set the stage for a new epoch in spacecraft telecommunications. Its onboard Electra UHF relay transceiver [see photo, "Relay"] will serve as an engineering test bed for new communications and navigation technology that will be required for all future orbiters, landers, and rovers, to provide the faster data rates required for transfer of information from rovers and landers on the Martian surface to orbiters circling above.
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This artist's concept of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at Mars features one of its instruments - the Mars Climate Sounder - in action. Using nine channels across the visible and thermal infrared ranges of the spectrum, the Mars Climate Sounder looks first at space through the atmosphere above the horizon of Mars to get a vertical profile with temperature, pressure, dust opacity and water vapor concentration measurements every 5 kilometers (3 miles) in the vertical from the ground to 80 km (~50 miles). It ... looks down onto the planet to get surface temperature and column abundances of dust and water vapor.
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NASA’s newest mission to the red planet—the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)—is working well as it shaves off altitude in order to swing into active science-gathering duties later this year. The initial capture by Mars’ gravity put the spacecraft into a very elongated, 35-hour orbit.
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NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2005, is on a search for evidence that water persisted on the surface of Mars for a long period of time. While other Mars missions have shown that water flowed across the surface in Mars' history, it remains a mystery whether water was ever around long enough to provide a habitat for life.
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NASA's $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission faces a make-or-break milestone March 10 when it fires its main engines for nearly a half hour, slowing the craft enough to slip into orbit around the red planet. If the burn doesn't work or is too short, MRO will race past Mars and on into a useless orbit around the sun.
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Just seven months after shooting through a nearly pristine blue sky in the Florida humidity, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is quickly approaching the red planet. The spacecraft team that has been working furiously during the orbiter's cruise is now preparing for a big moment at Mars: the mission-critical Mars orbit insertion.
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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter