Meteor showers, Mars satellites, and shuttle launches
A smattering of space and astonomy news tonight…
After scrubbing the scheduled Discovery launch, NASA plans to go ahead with the launch on Tuesday, assuming there are no problems.
Shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said the only way to thoroughly check the system is to fuel Discovery and have all its equipment running.
“We believe the best way to go through this is to do a countdown,” he said. “If the sensors (gauges) work exactly like we think they will, then we’ll launch on that day. If anything goes not per the plan that we’ve laid out in front of us, then we’ll have a scrub and we’ll have to talk about it.”
This will be the first shuttle mission in two years, since the Columbia tragedy.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is scheduled to embark on its six-month journey on August 10, blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The MRO is special for a few reasons:
- It’s huge: 4 stories by 2 stories; 2180Kg.
- It will glide 20% closer to the planet, at an average height of 305Km from the surface.
- It will take pictures over an area 10x larger than previous surveys.
- It will be able to transmit 10x the amount of information per minute than any other Mars probe. (I wonder what the actual data rate will be?)
There are six instruments on board:
- The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment which will snap pictures that can resolve objects as small as an office desk* over 1% of the entire Martian surface.
- The Context Camera which takes wide-angle images
- The Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) which will be able to identify minerals over an area as small as a swimming pool.**
- The Shallow Radar (SHARAD) will measure the atmosphere’s water vapor, dust, and temperature with twice the sensitivity of previous probes
- The Mars Color Imager will track daily weather changes***
- Another (unnamed) instrument to make future landings safer by finding Mars’s two moons (Phobos and Deimos) based on their predicted missions so future landers can use their gravity to land closer to their targets
Click for a larger image of the MRO (4.22MB).
* 1 office desk is a new SI unit recently developed by NASA. It is equal to 1/20th of a swimming pool.
**1 swimming pool is another SI unit developed by NASA. It is equal to 20 office desks.
***No word on whether weathermen on Mars will suck too.
Mars will join the Perseid Meteor Shower on August 12 before sunrise.
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so could you explain more detials on MRO.
Comment by jack — January 9, 2006 @ 4:28 pm