Mars Odyssey Mission Status 12 Oct 2001

Following last night’s final planned course correction,
NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft is now on target to enter
Martian orbit later this month.

At 0400 Universal time on Friday, Oct. 12 (9 p.m. Pacific
time, Thursday, Oct. 11), Odyssey fired its small thrusters
for three seconds, which changed the speed and direction of
the spacecraft by 0.077 meters per second (0.17 miles per
hour). Odyssey will arrive at Mars at 0226 Universal time
Oct. 24 (7:26 p.m. Pacific time Oct. 23).

“This was a tiny maneuver, designed to change our
altitude at arrival by just a few kilometers. The burn went
exactly as planned,” said David A. Spencer, Odyssey’s mission
manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

On Monday, Oct. 15, the flight team will uplink the
sequence of commands that pre-programs the spacecraft to fire
its main engine and allows the spacecraft to be captured by
the planet’s gravity and enter orbit around Mars.

Today, Odyssey is 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million
miles) from Mars, traveling at a speed of 23 kilometers per
second (51,800 miles per hour) relative to the Sun.

The 2001 Mars Odyssey mission is managed by JPL for
NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a
division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. The Odyssey spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin
Astronautics, Denver. The thermal emission imaging system is
managed by Arizona State University, Tempe, and the gamma ray
spectrometer is managed by the University of Arizona, Tucson.
NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, built and manages the
Martian radiation environment experiment.