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| This artist's concept shows NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission over the red planet. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
By Himanshu Goenka, International Business Times
Mars, the intended destination of the maiden flight of SpaceX’s
Falcon Heavy rocket, will not be where Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster will
find its eternal parking spot, considering the fact that the rocket
overshot its trajectory. But had things gone exactly according to Musk’s
plans, the payload would have shared a Martian orbit with other
spacecraft, such as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The
spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars for almost 12 years now, is
having some trouble of its own, even though it doesn’t seem to
be something particularly worrisome. MRO put itself into standby mode —
suspending all science and most communication operations — Thursday,
after its internal battery showed unusually low voltage.
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power system MRO uses relies on solar energy, but there are times during
the orbit when the orbiter is in Mars’ shadow, and no sunlight falls on
it. During those periods, nickel-hydrogen batteries kick in, ensuring
an almost identical voltage is maintained on the spacecraft at all
times.
Why exactly that battery showed low voltage suddenly is
still being investigated by NASA. However, it has been restored to
return to its normal levels, and the spacecraft itself is being
monitored till such troubleshooting is finished.
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| Textured rows on the ground in this portion of "Perseverance Valley" are under investigation by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which used its Navigation Camera to take the component images of this downhill-looking scene. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
“We’re in the diagnostic stage, to better understand the behavior of
the batteries and ways to give ourselves more options for managing them
in the future. We will restore MRO’s service as a relay for other
missions as soon as we can do so with confidence in spacecraft safety —
likely in about one week. After that, we will resume science
observations,” MRO project manager Dan Johnston of NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, said in a statement Saturday.
Other
than its science missions, MRO also works as a communications relay
point between Earth and NASA’s Mars rovers — Opportunity and Curiosity.
That relay was also suspended in the standby mode, but MRO was still
communicating on its own with NASA.
Opportunity, which has been on
the surface of Mars since Jan. 25, 2004, made a landmark Saturday, when
it saw its 5,000th Martian dawn. One Martian day is referred to as a
sol, and is almost 40 minutes longer than the 24-hour day on Earth. So,
in Earth terms, the rover has spent 5,139 days on the red planet, even
though its original mission was designed to last for only 90 sols.
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“Five
thousand sols after the start of our 90-sol mission, this amazing rover
is still showing us surprises on Mars. We’ve reached lots of
milestones, and this is one more, but more important than the numbers
are the exploration and the scientific discoveries,” Opportunity project
manager John Callas, of JPL, said in a statement Friday.
The most recent scientific observation made by Opportunity was of
possible “rock stripes” on Mars, which on Earth are caused by “repeated
cycles of freezing and thawing of wet soil. But it might also be due to
wind, downhill transport, other processes or a combination.”
According to a NASA statement Thursday, scientists are still unsure how these stripes came about, and are postulating various theories.
