Safer landings
THEMIS has returned more than 1 million images since it began orbiting Mars. The images and maps it has produced highlight the presence of dangers, such as topographical features and rocks, but it also helps ensure the safety of future astronauts by showing the location of resources such as water ice. It helps the Mars science community and NASA decide where to send landers and rovers – including the Perseverance Rover, which hit on February 18, 2021.
Routine calls home
From an early age, Odyssey served as a long-distance call center for NASA’s robbers and landers, sending their data back to Earth as part of the Mars Relay Network. The idea of Mars relay dates back to the 1970s, when the two Viking landers sent scientific data and images back to Earth through an orbit. An orbiter can carry radios or antennas that can send back more data than a spacecraft. But Odyssey made the process routine when it began transferring data to and from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity robbers.
“When the twin controversy landed, the success of data transfer using UHF frequency was a game changer,” said Chris Potts of JPL, Odyssey’s mission manager.
Every day the robbers could go somewhere new and send fresh images back to earth. Through a relay like Odyssey, scientists used to get more data, while the public got more Mars images to be excited about. Odyssey has supported more than 18,000 relay sessions. These days, it shares the communications task with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN, along with the ESA (European Space Agency) Trace Gas Orbiter.
Delicious moons
Odyssey did such a thorough job studying the Martian surface that scientists began turning its THEMIS camera to get a unique view of Marsmane Phobos and Deimos. As with the Martian surface, studying the thermophysics of each lunar moon helps scientists determine the properties of materials on their surfaces. Such information may give a glimpse into their past: it is unclear whether the moons are trapped asteroids or pieces of Mars, which are blown off the surface by an ancient impact.
Future missions, such as the Japanese Space Agency’s spaceship Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), will attempt to land on these moons. In the distant future, missions will even be able to create astronauts on it for astronauts. And if they do, they will rely on data from an orbit that began with the odyssey at the beginning of the millennium.
THEMIS was built and is run by Arizona State University in Tempe. Odyssey’s Gamma Ray Spectrometer was provided by the University of Arizona, Tucson, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Russian Institute for Space Research. The main contractor for the Odyssey project, Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, developed and built the runway. Mission operations are conducted jointly by Lockheed Martin and by JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena.
For more information on Odyssey, visit:
https://mars.nasa.gov/odyssey/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/odyssey/index.html