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Mercury, September/October 2002 Table of Contents

Courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Los Alamos National Laboratory.

by Stephane Barile

NASA’s Mars Odyssey has both good news and bad news for future Martian explorers.

Mars Odyssey, inserted into Martian orbit in October 2001, is by all accounts a resounding success. And for NASA’s sake, it needed to be. The Odyssey team found itself under tremendous pressure following in the wake of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter fiascoes.

“Odyssey has met every expectation,” says project manager Roger Gibbs. “We did many things to ensure success, but there’s still an inherent risk that cannot be eliminated, and the team is well aware of what can go wrong.” Now that all of the mission’s critical events are concluded, the Odyssey spacecraft will continuously collect data from its 420-kilometer-high orbit for 2 1/2 Earth years (1 1/3 Martian years), and there’s a good chance the mission will be extended after that.

“The mission means a lot to NASA because it shows we can safely get cutting-edge science instruments to Mars,” says Guy Beutelschies of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is chief engineer of the $297 million mission.