A NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars is using the most powerful cameras ever pointed at the Red Planet to study its climate cycles and whether there is enough water to support a manned mission, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Monday.
Images taken during a test of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) instruments showed clay-rich areas that could have supported life and frost, and layered deposits of ice and dirt at the polar ice cap indicate “dynamic climate changes” as recently as 100,000 years ago, scientist Scott Murchie told reporters.
“We are seeing a new Mars,” project scientist Richard Zurek said at a news conference. “We are seeing information comparable to, or better than, what you could see flying over Earth in a commercial airliner.”
Launched in August 2005, the orbiter dropped into a low orbit around Mars last month to map the planet’s subsurface minerals, monitor its atmosphere and look for evidence of enough subsurface ice or water to process into oxygen, concrete and rocket fuel for manned exploration.
President George W. Bush has urged NASA to focus on getting people to the moon and Mars, although a manned mission to Mars is still many years away.
The Mars orbiter has the most advanced and powerful instruments of four science satellites circling the planet and will return more than 10 times the quantity of data during its two-year mission than all the other probes combined. (Explore the orbiter)
The orbiter will also use HiRISE, its super high-resolution camera, to find landing sites for the Phoenix Mars Lander, set to arrive in 2008, and for the 2009 arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory, a larger version of the twin robotic geologists Spirit and Opportunity, which have been traversing the planet’s surface since 2004.
I just love to see pictures of other planets! Telescope and space cameras have advanced so much in the past decade and it’s allowing us a better look at our next door neighbours. NASA keeps saying that one day we will be able to inhabit other planets, one of the most likely being Mars. However, I believe that we should have clear plan in place to keep the planet healthy and be ready to enforce it.
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