Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter comes out of safe mode
On February 23 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) engineering team was able to bring the spacecraft out of safe mode, after a low battery voltage reading caused it to shut down.
Mission team members brought MRO out of safe mode on Friday (Feb. 23), NASA officials said. The orbiter seems to be in good health overall; the battery voltage is back to normal, MRO is communicating with Earth, and temperatures and power levels are stable, agency officials said.
But MRO’s handlers haven’t put the orbiter back to work yet. “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,” MRO project manager Dan Johnston, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “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.”
Overall this sounds like very good news.
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On February 23 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) engineering team was able to bring the spacecraft out of safe mode, after a low battery voltage reading caused it to shut down.
Mission team members brought MRO out of safe mode on Friday (Feb. 23), NASA officials said. The orbiter seems to be in good health overall; the battery voltage is back to normal, MRO is communicating with Earth, and temperatures and power levels are stable, agency officials said.
But MRO’s handlers haven’t put the orbiter back to work yet. “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,” MRO project manager Dan Johnston, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “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.”
Overall this sounds like very good news.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
MRO has one of the two penetrating radars in orbit around Mars, the other being on Mars Express. Bob, do you know if either have imaged Valles Marineris and if they would have the ability to detect the huge amounts of ice claimed to be there in this 2013 Geomorphology paper? One million cubic kilometers of fossil ice in Valles Marineris: Relicts of a 3.5 Gy old
glacial landsystem along the Martian equator — http://www.dmzone.org/papers/Gourroncetal2014_VM.pdf
Kirk: I don’t have a direct answer to your question. Recently however I read this paper, Geomorphological Evidence for Shallow Ice in the Southern Hemisphere of Mars, which suggested to me that the Mars planetary community has accepted the existence of what they call an “ice table” on Mars, vs a water table here on Earth. They think it disappears in the lower latitudes, and the paper was an effort to map its closest position to the equator.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JE005366/abstract
Thanks for that link Bob.
The 2013 Geomorphology paper seems almost too good to be true, so it’s strange that I can’t find any critique — positive or negative — of it. Anyone interested in the question of water on Mars should give it a look. The researchers claim that Valles Marineris, a rift valley, shows extensive signs of glaciation in the past, and that once the period of active glaciation was over, a huge amount of fossil ice was left behind covered in debris — both wind blown and ablation till. The shape of the ablation till along the sides of the canyons suggests that 0.3 million km^3 of that ice has sublimated, but that up to 1.0 million km^3 remain. That’s as much ice as is in a Martian polar cap, or 40% that of the Greenland ice sheet, or the equivalent water of ten times all the fresh water in rivers and lakes on Earth. That is a huge amount of ice to be so near the equator.
I recently asked Pascal Lee (planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, chairman of the Mars Institute, and director of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames) about it, and while he had not heard of the paper before, he said he wasn’t at all surprised because “there is a lot of water ice on Mars.” He also pointed out that his contribution to NASA’s 50 candidate landing spots for the first human Mars expedition is in Valles Marineris.