MRO Enters Orbit!
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has successfully completed its Mars Orbital Insertion, becoming the third spacecraft in orbit around the red planet. Mission Control indicates that the spacecraft and systems are in good health.
Project manager Dr. Jim Graf stated that the orbital insertion process went flawlessly, and that they couldn’t have scripted it any better. Congratulations to the MRO team and JPL on a job well done.
I’ll post subsequent updates today as they become available; more to come…
Mission Status Center at Spaceflight Now
Added 16:55 CST:
There will be a MRO Post-Arrival News Briefing at 19:30 Eastern on NASA TV. Tune in here.
Added 19:20 CST:
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission manager Jim Graf raises his arms in celebration of the orbiter’s successful entry into orbit around Mars. Behind him is Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Dr. Charles Elachi, giving the “thumbs up.”
“This is a great milestone to have accomplished, but it’s just one of many milestones before we can open the champagne,” said Colleen Hartman, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Once we are in the prime science orbit, the spacecraft will perform observations of the atmosphere, surface, and subsurface of Mars in unprecedented detail.”
The spacecraft traveled about 500 million kilometers (310 million miles) to reach Mars after its launch from Florida on Aug. 12, 2005. It needed to use its main thrusters as it neared the planet in order to slow itself enough for Mars’ gravity to capture it. The thruster firing began while the spacecraft was still in radio contact with Earth, but needed to end during a tense half hour of radio silence while the spacecraft flew behind Mars.
“Our spacecraft has finally become an orbiter,” said JPL’s Jim Graf, project manager for the mission. “The celebration feels great, but it will be very brief because before we start our main science phase, we still have six months of challenging work to adjust the orbit to the right size and shape.”
For the next half-year, the mission will use hundreds of carefully calculated dips into Mars’ atmosphere in a process called “aerobraking.” This will shrink its orbit from the elongated ellipse it is now flying, to a nearly circular two-hour orbit. For the mission’s principal science phase, scheduled to begin in November, the desired orbit is a nearly circular loop ranging from 320 kilometers (199 miles) to 255 kilometers (158 miles) in altitude, lower than any previous Mars orbiter.
Can’t wait to see the first Martian imagery MRO returns.
Read more at The Planetary Society:
Another Step in Mars Exploration
In the groove around the red planet.
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It’s getting kind of crowded up thrre, you figure the GGG is losing it’s touch? Really looking forwards to seeing the shots from the hi-res camera, hope we might even get a few during the aerobrake phase.
In today’s local Indian newspaper, there is a bold letter heading on the front page that the MRO has entered into the mars orbit, and now for the people of the earth this is an important opportunity to get a “relay-information” from mars. it is also learnt from the news, that to receive the message from there requires 12 minute period and the same is require to send the information from the earth based station.
I Congratulate the team,(the concerns) who made this possible, who have made this machine, in short “our brain is working there in the form of machine” though we are here.
very nice and awesome achievement.
:)
sunil