Mars Odyssey flying fine

A drawing of Mars Odyssey

By Amanda Barnett
CNN

(CNN) -- A day after reaching its destination, NASA reported the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is in a healthy orbit and has already started collecting data about Earth's red neighbor.

Odyssey is now circling Mars once every 18 hours and 36 minutes.

Launched on April 7 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the $300-million, 1.7-ton ship, completed its journey of about 285 million miles (456 million kilometers) Tuesday night when it successfully fired its main engine to slow into orbit.

"I am proud and happy to report that Odyssey is in orbit and is healthy," said Matt Landano, Odyssey project manager.

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"We absolutely hit the bull's eye on the incoming trajectory," said mission navigator Bob Mase.

"We were aiming for a point 300 kilometers (186.5 miles) above Mars and we hit that point within one kilometer (.6 miles)," Mase said. "Because of the excellent main engine burn, we will not need to do any more maneuvers to adjust the orbit before we begin aerobraking on Friday."

Aerobraking -- basically dragging Odyssey on the atmosphere of Mars -- will be used over the next few months to slide the spacecraft into a more circular permanent orbit.

There was applause and hugs at Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, when mission managers received data Tuesday night indicating that Odyssey had successfully fired its main engine. The 20-minute maneuver slowed the spacecraft and allowed it to be captured by the gravity of Mars.

The Deep Space Network, a group of three communications facilities placed around the world to track satellites, reported it had a solid lock on Odyssey's signal.

Wednesday morning, ground controllers at JPL activated one of Odyssey's experiments, the gamma ray spectrometer. The instrument package is designed to analyze chemicals on the surface of Mars and to look for water near the surface, if it exists.

Odyssey also was designed to measure radiation levels on Mars. The probe will not land, but will map Mars for 917 Earth days then serve as a communications relay for future satellites.

The challenge of Mars

Odyssey is the first spacecraft to arrive at Mars since two NASA spacecraft were lost in 1999.

"How sweet it is," said NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in a news conference to announce the success of Mars Odyssey.

"Putting the Odyssey into orbit about Mars is an achievement that each and every American ought to take pride in," he said. "It embodies the true American spirit that we can win after being knocked down a few times."

In September of 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter presumably burned up in the martian atmosphere because propulsion engineers failed to convert English and metric units resulting in a miscalculation of the spacecraft's trajectory.

Three months later, its sibling spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, likely crashed because a software glitch shut off the descent engines prematurely, sending it on a fatal plunge.

According to NASA, of the 30 missions sent to Mars by three countries over 40 years, fewer than one-third have been successful.

A joint odyssey

Mars Odyssey mission manager Matt Landano, far right, shakes hands with other managers after learning Odyssey had made it into orbit.

Odyssey isn't alone in monitoring Mars. It joins another satellite, Mars Global Surveyor, which has been circling Mars since 1997, snapping hundreds of thousands of high-resolution pictures.

Surveyor's camera can spot details as small as 3 meters. Odyssey also has a camera. It cannot focus as well as Surveyor's camera, but it has the ability to "see" much more than physical topography.

The new orbiter is equipped with an infrared imaging camera that can distinguish the mineral content of geologic features only 110 yards (100 meters) across, compared to 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) for a similar instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor. On Sunday, scientists will take the first picture with Odyssey's imaging camera -- a wide-angle view of the planet's southern hemisphere.

Odyssey begins the bulk of its science mission after reaching its permanent orbit in January, 2002.