NASA has changed the orbit of the Odyssey spacecraft to help them gather more data on how clouds, surface frost, and morning fogs develop on surface of Mars.
The change in orbit took place on Thursday as NASA's engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver maneuvered the spacecraft to start a drift to follow Mars' morning orbit. The desired change in position will be done bit by bit and Odyssey should be in its new location by November 2015.
"We're teaching an old spacecraft new tricks," said Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey Project Scientist of JPL in a press release. "Odyssey will be in position to see Mars in a different light than ever before."
The change in orbit will help astronomers find data how the surface temperatures change after sunrise and sunset on different locations on the Red Planet. These data can be used to analyze the ground composition with relation to temperature.
Odyssey was officially launched in 2001 and it has been observing Mars for 12 years now. The spacecraft's orbit is in sync with the sun and for most of its stay at Mars, Odyssey starts its orbit at 5 o'clock local solar time. This schedule enables the spacecraft to keep its cooling equipment and the Gamma Ray Spectrometer away from the heat of the sun. The Gamma Ray Spectrometer is used to look for evidence of water in the surface of Mars and to date; it has discovered traces of hydrogen along with other elements in the Martian surface.
Philip Christensen, Principal Investigator of the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was the one who proposed shifting the orbit of Odyssey to enable it to make daylight observations. The change will allow the spacecraft to make a north to south half orbit at 6:45 am rather than north to south half at 5 am.
"We don't know exactly what we're going to find when we get to an orbit where we see the morning just after sunrise," Christensen stated. "We can look for seasonal differences. Are fogs more common in winter or spring? We will look systematically. We will observe clouds in visible light and check the temperature of the ground in infrared."
