Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 16, 1993 TAG: 9308160031
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PASADENA, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
Mars Observer zooms into orbit around the Red Planet this month as the United States returns to Martian skies for the first time in 17 years with a spacecraft of unprecedented sophistication.
"We're going back to Mars because we're curious," said Arden Albee, chief scientist of the $980 million mission run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"We want to understand what makes it tick, how the atmosphere and weather works, what the climate history was, did water carve the canyons and channels we see and, if so, where did it go?"
Mars Observer, launched from Florida last Sept. 25, is scheduled to reach Mars on Aug. 24 after a curving 450 million-mile journey.
It will fire its braking rockets for 29 minutes to drop into an elongated orbit around the dry, mostly frigid planet. The spacecraft will spend the next 2 1/2 months maneuvering into a 234-mile-high, circular, near-polar orbit.
Then the orbiter will turn on its instruments and make one complete photographic map of the planet during a monthlong test.
After that, for at least 687 Earth days - one Martian year - Mars Observer will circle the planet every 118 minutes, taking tens of thousands of photographs and measurements as seasons change.
It will give the project's American, British, French, German and Russian scientists their most detailed global look at landscape, weather, climate and internal workings of Mars.
"We're going out and exploring. It's entertainment for the soul," said geologist Michael Malin, designer of the Mars Observer camera, built to see finer details that any spacecraft except Earth-orbiting military spy satellites.
NASA's Mariner 4 produced the first close-up, but much less detailed pictures of Mars' surface in 1965. The last U.S. vessels to visit the planet were the twin Viking orbiters and their landers, which settled on the red terrain in 1976.
Researchers hope Mars Observer will show how Martian climate changed over the eons and whether conditions ever were suitable for life, even though life probably doesn't exist now, said Albee, a geologist, planetary scientist and graduate dean at the California Institute of Technology.
by CNB