This is what astronauts orbiting Mars would see: Mars Odyssey captured photos showing the landscape

The ship Mars Odyssey of the POT captured a series of unprecedented panoramas showing the curved Martian landscape beneath vaporous layers of clouds and dust.

Stitched end to end, the 10 images offer not only a stunning view of Mars, but also one that will help scientists gain new insights into the Martian atmosphere.

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The spacecraft, which has completed its 22-year mission, took the images in May from an altitude of approximately 400 kilometers, the same altitude at which the space station flies above Earth.

“If there were astronauts orbiting Mars, this is the perspective they would have,” Arizona State University’s Jonathon Hill, operations leader for Odyssey’s camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS, said in a statement. “No Mars spacecraft has ever had this kind of view before.”

The reason the view is so rare is because of the challenges involved in creating it. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission, and Lockheed Martin Space, which built Odyssey and co-leads daily operations, spent three months planning THEMIS observations. The infrared camera’s sensitivity to heat allows it to map ice, rocks, sand and dust, along with temperature changes, on the planet’s surface.

This is NASA’s oldest Mars orbiter. (Photo: mars.nasa.gov)

It can also measure how much water ice or dust is in the atmosphere, but only in a narrow column directly below the spacecraft. This is because THEMIS is fixed to the orbiter; It usually points downwards.

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The mission wanted a broader view of the atmosphere. Seeing where those cloud layers of water, ice and dust are in relation to each other (whether there is one layer or several stacked on top of each other) helps scientists improve models of Mars’ atmosphere.

“I think it’s like seeing a cross section, a slice through the atmosphere,” said Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey project scientist at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). “There are a lot of details that can’t be seen from above, which is how THEMIS typically makes these measurements.”

Because THEMIS cannot rotate, adjusting the camera angle requires adjusting the position of the entire spacecraft. In this case, the team needed to rotate the orbiter nearly 90 degrees while ensuring that the sun would still shine on the spacecraft’s solar panels, but not on sensitive equipment that could overheat. The easiest orientation turned out to be one in which the orbiter’s antenna pointed away from Earth. That meant the team was out of communication with Odyssey for several hours until the operation was completed.

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The Odyssey mission hopes to take similar images in the future, capturing the Martian atmosphere over multiple seasons.

To make the most of its effort, the mission also captured images of Mars’ small moon, Phobos. This is the seventh time in 22 years that the THEMIS orbiter has aimed THEMIS at the moon to measure temperature variations on its surface.

“We have a different Phobos angle and lighting conditions than we are used to,” Hill said. “That makes it a unique part of our Phobos data set.”

The new images provide information about the composition and physical properties of the moon. Additional studies could help resolve the debate over whether Phobos, which measures about 25 kilometers (16 miles) in diameter, is a captured asteroid or an ancient chunk of Mars that was ejected from the surface by an impact.

Source: Elcomercio