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NASA Mars Orbiter Learns New Moves After Nearly 20 Years in Space
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is testing a series of large spacecraft rolls that will help it hunt for water.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech“We’re unique in that the entire spacecraft and its software are designed to let us roll all the time,” said Reid Thomas, MRO’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. These two radargrams from the SHARAD instrument on NASA’s MRO reveal how the spacecraft’s new “very large roll” maneuver produces a stronger signal, providing a brighter, clearer picture of the Martian subsurface. “Rolling used to restrict our science,” said Mars Climate Sounder’s interim principal investigator, Armin Kleinboehl of JPL, “but we’ve incorporated it into our routine planning, both for surface views and calibration.”
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