A European
probe circling Mars has hit a snag in the deployment of a water-seeking radar
instrument, prompting mission controllers to delay the experiment while
engineers investigate the problem.
Flight
controllers for the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express probe halted
plans to deploy the second boom in a series of antennas that comprise the
spacecraft's subsurface radar instrument after detecting an anomaly on May 7.
The anomaly
occurred as Mars Express completed the deployment of its first radar antenna
boom. Of the 13 segments that make up the boom, flight engineers confirmed that
only 12 had swung into the proper position. The remaining segment had deployed,
but was not positively locked into position and an investigation is underway,
ESA officials said.
While flight
controllers at ESA's European Space Operations in Darmstadt, Germany had hoped
to deploy all three booms by May 12, the unfurling of the remaining antennas
will not resume until engineers fully understand the current anomaly, as well
as its implications to future boom deployment.
ESA
officials said that the possibility of a deployment delay was not unexpected,
and that plans were already in place to reschedule unfurling the second radar antenna
in the event of any anomalous events with the first boom.
Mars
Express' antenna booms form the probe's Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and
Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument, a ground-penetrating radar designed to
peer beneath the red planet's surface and scan for deposits of water or ice. The
first two booms to be unfurled are dipole antennas each 66 feet (20 meters)
long. A third, monopole antenna is 23 feet (seven meters) in length, according
to NASA officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena,
California, which is collaborating with ESA on the Mars Express mission.
MARSIS
scientists hope their instrument will be able to penetrate up to three miles (five
kilometers) beneath Mars' surface and return distinguishable radar echoes for sand
dunes, rock and potential water deposits. The low radio frequencies used by
MARSIS will also be tapped to study Mars' ionosphere and the local effects of solar
wind, researchers said.
"The radar
gives us two ways to explore the fate of water that once flowed on the surface
of Mars," said Jeffrey Plaut, a MARSIS co-investigator at JPL, in a statement earlier
this month. "We will probe beneath the surface for evidence of frozen or liquid
reservoirs, and we will study the outer fringes of Mars' atmosphere, where the
planet may have lost its water to space."
The MARSIS instrument
is one of seven science experiments riding aboard Mars Express, which launched
from Earth on June 2, 2003 and reached the red planet in December of that year.
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