Mars Odyssey Mission Status – June 18, 2001

NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft is in excellent health as
engineers continue to check out and evaluate the performance of its systems
and science instruments during its early cruise phase.

Friday morning, June 15, flight controllers successfully conducted a
visible imaging calibration test of the thermal emission imaging system by
pointing the instrument at a star, Menkent, and taking several pictures.
Those data were transmitted to Earth during the weekend. Also last week,
engineers began a process of heating the gamma ray spectrometer detector in
order to erase radiation damage that has naturally occurred to the detector
thus far during cruise. The detector will then be in an optimal state to
collect science data once the gamma sensor head door is opened later this
month.

Earlier this month, engineers successfully tested the UHF radio
system by sending and receiving data via the 46-meter UHF antenna at
Stanford University in California. The team is continuing to review the data
from those tests and plans to conduct additional tests this week.

The Deep Space Network has taken several measurements using the delta
differential one-way range measurement, a technique that uses two ground
stations to determine the angular position of the spacecraft relative to the
known position of a quasar. The measurements provide the navigation team
with an additional source of information, adding confidence to their
estimates of the Odyssey flight path.

Currently, Odyssey is 26.6 million kilometers (16.5 million miles)
from Earth, traveling at a speed of 27.6 kilometers per second (about 61,900
miles per hour) relative to the Sun.

The Mars Odyssey mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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 provided by Arizona State University, the gamma ray
spectrometer is provided by the University of Arizona.