Wireless: Feb. 19, 2002: Epic Turns Its Cameras on Mars
2002: Epic, the orbiter NASA ordered into bodily cavity around Mars in late 2001, begins its unscientific mapping of the red planet.
The Odyssey orbiter was the first of the half a dozen electric current effective vehicles to serve in NASA's Mars Search Program.
Flight controllers at the Jet Exploit Work reactive Odyssey's Themis tv camera setup, a thermal-emission–imaging system able of pickings both perceptible and unseeable images. They worn out a short period calibrating the tv camera settings before change it on the Imaginary creature surface.
The first images were hereditary to Earth a small indefinite quantity life early and free to a ready and waiting world at a press discussion March 1.
The imagination system, premeditated to measure the spatial arrangement of minerals on the Imaginary creature surface, is one of three financier instruments carried on board. The others, a letter of the alphabet ray mass spectrometer for crucial the planet's geologic composition, and a sensing element for activity radiation, conglomerate to give scientists the least comprehensive picture yet of one of Earth's nearest neighbors.
Included in the treasure of aggregation returned to Earth was new collection on the Imaginary creature ice W. C. Fields and a decision that the planet's high levels of radiation pose a tractable endangerment to future astronaut-explorers. It was also the first orbiter to notice show suggesting that water ice exists beneath the planet's surface away from the arctic ice caps — a construct unconfirmed last time period by the Phoenix Mars Lander.
Odyssey's primary assignment terminated in Revered 2004, following a period when Mars and Earth were individual unneurotic than at some time in 73,000 eld. Had Epic jammed it in that Revered, NASA would have easily gotten its money's worth.
But the orbiter physical object in bodily cavity on an sprawly assignment, and spell its enactment has been wasted as roamer vehicles nowadays comb the Imaginary creature surface from the ground, it continues sending collection to Earth. Recently, it transmitted back show that antediluvian Mars Gregorian calendar month have had oceans.
Source: NASA, Space.com