NASA's Mars Odyssey has passed a major mechanical hurdle, deploying on June 4 a long mast that is capped by scientific sensors. The science gear is critical in determining the elemental makeup of the Martian surface.
Engineers at Lockheed Martin Astronautics near Denver, Colorado -- who handcrafted Odyssey -- report that all went well in deploying the spacecraft's 20-foot (6.2-meter) boom.
A gamma ray spectrometer (GRS) is mounted at the boom's end. That instrument is the same device that has recorded huge deposits of underground hydrogen, in the form of water ice. By extending the boom-mounted GRS, interference from any gamma rays coming from the spacecraft itself are minimized.
Excellent health
"It's been a good day," said Bob Berry, Lockheed Martin's 2001 Mars Odyssey Program Manager. "It just looks beautiful... just like the predictions," he told SPACE.com. Data relayed from Odyssey show that the boom was fully outstretched.
"The significant thing about this event," Berry said, "is that this is the last configuration change of the spacecraft. Everything has worked out just great. The spacecraft is in excellent health."
Berry said that Odyssey teams at Lockheed Martin and at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. -- overall manager of the spacecraft mission -- were ready to act if the boom only partly deployed. A less-than-lengthy mast would have caused headaches in accurate pointing of science instruments, he said.But now over 100 days into its mission about Mars, that type of problem is behind Odyssey engineers and scientists.
Suite success
On Wednesday, the plan is for the GRS sensor head door to be opened, thereby conditioning a cooler within the hardware. "In the next few days, high voltage will be applied to the instrument, powering it back up to start data acquisition.
Now fully extended from Odyssey, the gamma ray spectrometer can measure the abundance and distribution of about 20 primary elements of the periodic table, including silicon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, potassium, aluminum, calcium, sulfur, and carbon.
Knowing what elements are at or near the Martian surface will give detailed information about how Mars has changed over time. To determine the elemental makeup of the Martian terrain, the GRS experiment encompasses a gamma ray spectrometer and two neutron detectors.
The 2001 Mars Odyssey carries a suite of primary instruments that are all up and operational.
They are: The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) is determining the distribution of minerals, particularly those that can only form in the presence of water; the now fully-extended GRS; and the once-balky Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE) that came back to life and is gathering data on the radiation environment around the Red Planet.
"So we have a full complement of instruments," Berry said. "From here on we should be in a kind of, hopefully, routine mode of taking science data. Now the science teams have their turn to really pump out," he said.
Built to serve
Also pleased about the boom's deployment is William Boynton, principal investigator for the GRS at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
"I am really excited to finally be in the true mapping configuration," Boynton told SPACE.com.
"We have been taking data with the instrument close to the spacecraft, which gives us a strong background signal. Now that the boom is erected, we can get away from this background and start collecting data in our most sensitive configuration. I am really looking forward to this next phase of the mission," he said.
Mars Odyssey was launched April 7, 2001 and reached Mars on October 24, 2001. Odyssey then began a series of aerobraking maneuvers, dipping into the thin Martian atmosphere to position itself into a correct science orbit.
Aerobraking ended in January of this year, and Odyssey began its science-mapping mission in February.
Odyssey's primary science mission will continue through August 2004.
The spacecraft is also built to serve as a communications relay for U.S. and international spacecraft scheduled to arrive at Mars in 2003 and 2004.
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