A bigger orange dot
A description that might occur to people seeing Mars through a telescope for the first time. On Wednesday January 27th, the red planet will be the closest it gets to Earth during the current apparition. Of course, 62 million miles isn’t exactly right around the corner. At its brightest, Mars will rival the visual magnitude of the night sky’s most luminous star, Sirius.
Since Mars’ record opposition of late August 2003 when it reached just under 35 million miles distant, all kinds of Mars-related activity has taken place. Some, like the perennial Mars hoax email, have served to increase misinformation common to pop astronomy. Others spurred on by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program mantra of “follow the water”, have yielded a bonanza of new discoveries and the endless series of questions we must answer to explain them.
The first weeks of 2004 saw the arrival of the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Now in their 6th year, operations continue although rover Spirit could certainly use a pitching wedge to break free of its treacherous sand trap. Together, the rovers have racked up a combined odometer total of 17 miles while trundling across the Martian surface.
Rover landing site selection was aided by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and its survey program to map the planet. After arriving to orbit nearly ten years ago, Odyssey’s primary science objectives were to determine the planet’s mineral and chemical composition, search for subsurface ice deposits and calculate the levels of radiation human explorers would face on future missions to Mars. Upon successfully completing its menu of tasks, Odyssey’s mission was extended in 2004. Today, Odyssey handles nearly 85% of communications with the Mars rovers.
This week Odyssey began a listening campaign which could detect a feeble signal from the Mars Phoenix lander. Phoenix mission scientists have little confidence that their lander survived the deep freeze of the northern winter. It seems unlikely there will be a restart of the mission because the lander’s computers and instruments weren’t designed to endure such extreme conditions. We shall see.
Returning from a pre-cautionary safe mode imposed after 4 spontaneous computer resets last year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has a new lease on life. Mission managers spent the past few months upgrading the MRO software package and running tests. In late December, the orbiter resumed normal science operations. The MRO has been quite successful taking some of the most detailed and high resolution images of the Martian surface ever seen. Its impressive portfolio includes images that document the movement of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
So far, MRO has sent back more data than all other Mars missions combined. In 2008, during the Phoenix lander’s descent, it achieved another historic milestone when its camera snapped the first shot ever taken by one spacecraft of another arriving to a distant world.
Mars has long had an influence on both the popular and scientific imagination. Those driven by its mystery range from Giovanni Schiaperelli to Percival Lowell and Steve Squyres. Many of us, at one time or another, have encountered fantastical claims related to the red planet. But as we continue to mine the secrets of Mars, I expect that we will find that the truth is even stranger than fiction.
