Quick and dirty landings
A top MRO agenda item is identifying the best, hazard-free locations for future landers to set down on Mars.
So powerful is the zoom-lens ability of MRO, picture-taking from orbit can mimic, in a sense, "quick and dirty" landings over and over, said Jim Garvin, NASA Mars Exploration Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in an earlier interview with SPACE.com.
MRO's science payload includes an atmospheric sounder. Also onboard is an Italian-built sub-surface sounding radar. By sweeping the sounding radar across Mars' terrain, underground reservoirs of ice and water should be detectable at certain depths.
"The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will explore from orbit several hundred localities on the surface of Mars, observing details that were previously visible only to landers," said Richard Zurek, MRO project scientist at JPL.
Zurek said the goal of MRO is to understand the history of water on Mars by observing the planet’s atmosphere, surface and subsurface in great detail.
"This mission will identify the best sites for a new generation of landed vehicles to explore, by virtue of its ability to find local evidence of the chemical and geological ‘fingerprints’ of water and other critical processes," Zurek said.
Lessons learned
In beating out other aerospace competitors, Lockheed Martin will be paid $145 million for the MRO work. The company will build the main segment of the orbiter, and be responsible for integrating and testing six science instruments and two engineering payloads.
Who will build MRO's high-resolution camera has not yet been determined.
Particularly happy to learn of the NASA decision is Lockheed Martin and its cadre of space engineers at the firm's Denver, Colorado facilities. The company suffered back to back failures in 1999 of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. A major shakeout of the engineering and management practices of the aerospace company followed an intensive investigation of the two failed missions.
Now en route to the red planet is the heavily scrutinized and checked-out Mars Odyssey, also built by Lockheed Martin. That probe is nearing Mars and begins orbiting the planet in just a few weeks.
"We understand what things went wrong on other programs. In looking forward to MRO, we tried to infuse into that program the lessons learned from those failures," said Bob Berry, 2001 Mars Odyssey Program Manager.
"We have an extremely experienced team. It's a great advantage to have a continuing team that not only designs, develops the spacecraft, but knows how to fly the spacecraft," Berry told SPACE.com.
The MRO is part of a sequence of NASA Mars missions built to unravel multiple mysteries about the planet, such as understanding the history of water on the far away world. Finding local evidence of water may also unveil the prospects for past, or possibly present life on Mars.
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