Mars Odyssey Mission Status 13 Mar 2002

Flight controllers for NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft
report the martian radiation environment experiment began
gathering science data today after their troubleshooting
efforts successfully reestablished communications with the
instrument.

Engineers have been working since late February, trying a
variety of techniques to communicate with the instrument,
which stopped working in August. The results of their tests
indicate the problem may be related to a memory error in the
onboard software of the radiation instrument.

“This is very exciting. We have been carefully working
this issue, and establishing communication means we now have
the entire payload working,” said Roger Gibbs, Odyssey’s
project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif.

The team established initial communication with the
instrument late last week and has spent several days
evaluating its health. Controllers returned the radiation
monitor to its science collection mode this afternoon.

Odyssey’s camera system and gamma ray spectrometer suite
are continuing to collect data and are working well. Science
team members reported this week that the camera’s infrared and
visible image data are providing “new eyes” to see the makeup
of martian surface materials. Current targets for the camera
include the candidate landing sites for the twin 2003 Mars
exploration rovers. The neutron detectors in the gamma ray
spectrometer suite are refining the detail in maps of near-
surface hydrogen and are tracking changes in the surface as
the martian northern winter comes to an end.

JPL manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA’s
Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Principal
investigators at Arizona State University in Tempe, the
University of Arizona in Tucson, and NASA’s Johnson Space
Center, Houston, operate the science instruments. Additional
science investigators are located at the Russian Space
Research Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratories, New
Mexico. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime
contractor for the project, and developed and built the
orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from
Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena.