NASA’s Mars Odyssey continues to watch the red planet five years after arriving at its target.

Launched on April 7, 2001, NASA’s Mars Odyssey mission began in earnest in January 2002 when the orbiter entered its science orbit.

Since then, the orbiter has returned thousands of images to map the Maritian surface, hunt for minerals and water indicators and seek potential landing sites for future missions.

The orbiter even had its own close up in May 2005, when NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor probe – also an orbiter – photographed Odyssey and Europe’s Mars Express in orbit around the red planet.

This archival image was taken by Mars Odyssey in December 30, 2002 during its first full year of operations at Mars.

A team led by Phil Christensen, principal investigator for Odyssey's cameras at Arizona State University, Jim Bell at Cornell University, and space artist Don Davis created this panorama, adding color to radiance files from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), a camera on Odyssey that takes images in both the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum. They also correlated the radiance - intensity of reflected sunlight - with that of other color images from Mars and minimized the effects of residual scattered light in the images.

·          Special Report: Odyssey's Mission to Mars