[meteorite-list] NASA's Mars Odyssey Changes Views About Red Planet

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:23:48 2004
Message-ID: <200303132136.NAA26976_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Mary Hardin (818) 354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Nancy Neal (202) 358-1547
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

News Release: 2003-034
March 13, 2003

NASA's Mars Odyssey Changes Views About Red Planet

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has transformed the way scientists are
looking at the red planet.

"In just one year, Mars Odyssey has fundamentally changed our
understanding of the nature of the materials on and below the surface
of Mars," said Dr. Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey's project scientist at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

During its first year of surveying the martian surface, Odyssey's
camera system provided detailed maps of minerals in rocks and soils.
"A wonderful surprise has been the discovery of a layer of
olivine-rich rock exposed in the walls of Ganges Chasm. Olivine is
easily destroyed by liquid water, so its presence in these ancient
rocks suggests that this region of Mars has been very dry for a very
long time," said Dr. Philip Christensen, principal investigator for
Odyssey's thermal emission imaging system at Arizona State University,
Tempe.

"Infrared images have provided a remarkable new tool for mapping the
martian surface. The temperature differences we see in the day and
night images have revealed complex patterns of rocks and soils that
show the effects of lava flows, impact craters, wind and possibly
water throughout the history of Mars," Christensen said.

Odyssey has measured radiation levels at Mars that are substantially
higher than in low-Earth orbit. "The martian radiation environment
experiment has confirmed expectations that future human explorers of
Mars will face significant long-term health risks from space
radiation," said Dr. Cary Zeitlin, principal investigator for the
martian radiation environment experiment, National Space Biomedical
Research Institute, Houston. "We've also observed solar particle
events not seen by near-Earth radiation detectors."

The gamma ray spectrometer suite, which early in the mission
discovered vast amounts of hydrogen in the form of water ice trapped
beneath the martian surface, has also begun to map the elemental
composition of the surface.
      
 "We are just now getting our first look at global elemental
composition maps, and we are seeing Mars in a whole new light, gamma
ray 'light,' and that's showing us aspects of the surface composition
never seen before," said Dr. William Boynton, team leader for the
gamma ray spectrometer suite at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
Calif., manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of
Space Science in Washington, D.C. Investigators at Arizona State
University, the University of Arizona, and NASA's Johnson Space
Center, Houston, built and operate the science instruments.

Additional science partners are located at the Russian Aviation and
Space Agency and at Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico.
Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, the prime contractor for the
project, developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are
conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL.

Additional information about the 2001 Mars Odyssey is available on the
Internet at:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/

-end-
Received on Thu 13 Mar 2003 04:36:03 PM PST