Set To Enter Martian Orbit March 10

One week from Friday, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is expected to begin orbiting the Red Planet, after a seven-month journey from Earth. The probe was launched August 12, 2005.

The $720 million space probe will fire its braking engines for 27 minutes at precisely 4:24 pm MST March 10, beginning its maneuver that, hopefully, will slow the aircraft enough that the planet's gravity will pull it into orbit. Should the engines not fire as designed, the school-bus-sized spacecraft will shoot past Mars, it's mission over.

"Mars doesn't treat you very well, for the most part," said Doug McCuistion, NASA's Mars exploration program director, to the Rocky Mountain News. "So this is a very challenging thing to do."

Indeed, NASA has a 65 percent success rate at putting spacecraft into Mars orbit; nearly a third of all attempts have failed.

That's not meant to assume something will go amiss with the MRO; after all, NASA is riding a recent winning streak with its interplanetary missions. After all, isn't it harder to maneuver a spacecraft into the path of the tail of a comet 242 million miles from Earth -- and return it successfully?

Unlike the Stardust probe, however, the most crucial portion of the MRO's mission will be conducted out of NASA's sight -- the last nine minutes of the MRO's braking maneuver will happen on the far side of Mars, meaning the orbiter will be out of radar contact for approximately 30 minutes. Scientists on the ground won't know if the MRO was successfully captured by Mars' gravity until communications are reestablished.

Should all go to plan, the MRO will join two other probes in orbit around the Red Planet: the Mars Global Surveyor, launched in 1996, and Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001. Both have been resounding successes, completing a combined 50,000+ orbits around Mars.

Before those probes, however, NASA's Mars Observer and Mars Climate Orbiter were, ah, not so successful. The Observer vanished before it was to have entered orbit in 1993.

In 1999, the Climate Orbiter burned in the Martian atmosphere during its orbital braking maneuver, after it came too close to the Red Planet. The problem was later determined to be caused by engineers who programmed the spacecraft in English units, and not metric.

Scientists expect the MRO to fare much better.

"The team is trained and confident. The spacecraft systems are healthy and performing as expected, and we're looking forward to adding MRO to the (spacecraft) constellation at Mars," said Bob Berry, director of space exploration systems at Lockheed Martin.

MRO is larger than most of its predecessors, and is expected to return five times more data than all of them combined. It carries the HiRISE camera onboard, the most powerful telescopic camera ever sent to another planet.

Aero-News will bring our readers Real-Time updates of the spacecraft's progress. Stay tuned!

FMI: www.nasa.gov