Initial parking orbit is good - at last we're off the ground

During ascent I suddenly thought "woh, if this doesnt work - MSL is going to suffer a lot" - and got rather nervous

Not out of the woods yet- another centaur burn to go - and actually, I was suprised to hear that the centaur put the parking orbit perigee about 6 nm off target - that's a lot. Doesnt really matter that much I'd have though - it IS only a parking orbit after all, and it'll probabyl be made up on the second burn

Doug

Here's some more caps....

Presumably. Although hats off to the engineers and navigators - I've just been reading up on the mechanics of Earth\Mars transfer orbits and my head hurts.

It was a gorgeous launch -- the Atlas V is a sight to behold as it rises.

I found one thing almost alarming as I watched the launch -- as the bird rose, I noticed that a pipe remained attached to the vehicle, sticking out right where the payload fairing finishes flaring out at the base of the clamshell shroud. One of the launch replays shows it clearly, and in the very close shot, it really does look like it was designed that way. But it still looks very odd to have a pipe sticking three to four feet horizontally out of the payload fairing. I'd imagine it would induce some pretty severe aerodynamic loads.

And actually, a *very* small part of me was hoping that this launch would fail, so that NASA would have to fly a combined MRO/MTO in the next Mars launch window in 2007. That would have given them time to incorporate all of the high-bandwidth telecom capabilities of MTO into the replacement MRO, and we'd be able to get all that data down from MSL that we're now never gonna see... Don't get me wrong, I'm glad MRO is off and in good shape. But a little natural accident forcing Griffin's hand over the MTO issue would have been, I don't know, serendipitous...

-the other Doug

There's a video replay available from:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4134300.stm

And Other Doug, if you think MRO has sticky-out bits, remember the stuff hanging off the early Mariners at launch!.

MRO launch seen from my backyard about 45 miles south of the pad. If you look beyond the end of the contrail toward the top of the image, you can see the orange flame of the vehicle itself. Unless they have strap on solids, the Atlas5 and Delta4 don't really leave any smoke trail, which makes them difficult to follow in daylight beyond the contrail. Night launches, however, are a completely different story!

Click to view attachment

Just heard spacecraft separation... and all looks well so far...

Wishing MRO a safe journey.

I'm *JEALOUS*!

spaceflightnow reports solar arrays deployed and power levels looking good. There will also be a post-launch press conference around 10:30 ET

I didn't follow the launch live but it's very apparent in this still
Very odd indeed. Makes me want to reach for a pruner ...

My office mate and I were taking bets on what the PAO voice over chap (Greg Diller?) would say at lift off - my guess was "Lift-off of the Atlas V rocket with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - bringing us a closer view of the Red Planet" - or something like that...

but actually - what he said was just so pointless - all bets were cancelled
"And liftoff of the Atlas V rocket with MRO serving for the deepest insights into the mysterious evolution of mars"

Que?

Doug

They are still learning about the MRO...as their job are just to speak out.

Rodolfo

Yes,
It was an impressive launch, (viewed through Nasa TV).
i even managed to grab a few fuzzy shots of the lift-off as well…

Any one got a better link/photo of that pipe sticking out?


Seemingly the spacecraft is currently located near Mu Andromeda about 3 degrees from M31 so it might be worth someone snapping that...

Yeah I'll say! We should be aiming for picometers next time!

MCO rises from the ashes!

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av007/

'Sharp-eyed orbiter dispatched to Mars
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: August 12, 2005

A Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket boosted NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter into space today, kicking off a $720 million mission to sniff out underground ice deposits, to map the red planet's geology with unprecedented clarity and to monitor its tenuous, dusty atmosphere in an ongoing scientific assault.

The 4,800-pound solar-powered satellite, equipped with a 10-foot-wide antenna to beam a torrent of data back to Earth, also will serve as a communications satellite, relaying measurements and observations from current and future Mars landers while using its own ultra-high-resolution camera and other instruments to identify possible landing sites.

With six sophisticated instruments, including a giant 1.2-gigapixel camera capable of photographing objects as small as a kitchen table, the Mars Climate Orbiter is expected to beam back some 34 terabits of data over the life of the mission. That's three to four times the combined output of two spacecraft already in orbit around Mars, along with NASA's Cassini Saturn orbiter and the Magellan Venus orbiter.

"Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a weather satellite, a geological explorer, a communications satellite and an exploration pathfinder hunting for landing sites of the future for both robotic and human," said Doug McCuistion, Mars exploration program director at NASA headquarters.

"It lays the groundwork for the landing of the Phoenix mission in 2008 and the Mars Science Laboratory (nuclear-powered rover) in 2010. It will provide data relay for both of those spacecraft as well as the rovers (now on Mars) and future missions."'

Sharp-eyed proofreader needed on Earth?

Hehe.

MRO Will arrive there by March 2006 and start to work on November 2006 after many loops of aerobraking.

There will be 5 navegation correction points on its trajectory to Mars.

Good luck MRO and see you by then...

Rodolfo

You must have been doing string theory too much. Six nanometer is quite small in fact

Perhaps he means "nautical miles"?

Well, he actually said "surveying for the deepest insights into the mysterious evolution of Mars."

I think that has a point.

Yes, good luck MRO...
However, looking to HiRISE technical data, I was disappointed by the time requires to transmit a single swat high resolution image (20,000 pixels by 40,000): from 4 to 48 hours depending on range to earth and compression factors!
To me, it seems a huge waste of time/info and DSN usage to...
I do not know if this is figured with onboard Ka antenna but, for sure, situation would strongly improve with an optical transmission with a laser; I know this technology still experimental method but I think is worth to try to use it, in order to increase at least one order of magnitude the number of images transmitted back to Earth... or not?

Sounded like serving to me Surveying makes sense, but only if it was Mars Global Surveyor

Doug

Even at four miles distance, "reconnoitring" is a bit of a mouthful when being shaken up by 950,000 pounds of thrust!

40,000 height x ( 20,000 Red + 4000 B/G + 4000 NIR ) = 1,120,000,000 pixels

12 bits, but 2:1 compression - a total of 6,720,000,000 Bits of data in a full HiRISE image. That's 6,720 Mbits

Now - at the lowest rate quoted of 0.288 Mb/sec - thats a total of 23,333 seconds - or 6.48 hours of transmission

At the highest quoted figure of 5.8 mb/sec - thats 1158 seconds or 19 minutes.

But obviously - HiIRSE is only one instrument - and MARCI and CTX will also be generating big data sets of imaging - and there's other instruments as well of course - all generating lots of data - especially CRISM - a LOT of data there.

So given perhaps a 1:7 contention ratio in terms of data budget - those figures of 0.3 hrs to 6.4 hrs could turn to 2.1 hrs and 44hrs

Doug

Dilo:

Optical data transmission requires particularly high pointing capabilities with consequent mass costs - and the images you're talking about are, in any case, enormous swathes of Mars, so it's not such a 'worst case' as it looks, as the volume of data returned is in fact enormous. I don't know for sure, but I also expect that something similar to the MER thumbnail strategy may be applied, so that very high-res crops may be made from otherwise redundant data sets. There's no doubt, however, that in due course there will be a number of bottlenecks in the data transmission process, and that optical communication is a serious contender.

Bob Shaw

Dvandorn, there is absolutely no way they could combine the capabilities of MRO and MTO -- even if they had a lot more time than 2 years (which would be far too short even to build an exact copy of MRO). If we do lose MRO (not that I've heard about any trouble signs), it will be very bad news for the schedule of Mars exploration.

A key aspect of MTO was that it was supposed to be put into a high-altitude orbit around Mars, to prolong its communications periods with each lander to five or six 15 to 45-minute periods each sol -- as opposed to two 8-minute periods per sol for a low-altitude polar science orbiter. Science functions and communications functions do not combine at all well on an orbiter, of Earth or any other world.

As for MTO: as I said earlier, Griffin was under orders to cut something to enable higher-priority missions (for the Hubble repair and the very important Glory global-warming missions) and MTO was definitely the most dispensable item. If the Shuttle's travails lead to the cancellation of the Hubble repair -- in which case NASA could follow the more sensible course of building and launching an improved Hubble II on an unmanned booster, at its leisure -- it's possible we'll get MTO back. But I think the odds are against it, at least for another decade or so. (Particularly since the pace of the Mars program as a whole is being slowed down, meaning fewer landers with high data-return requirements over the next decade.)

That's "Glory global-warming mission" -- singular.

Bruce:

You're dead right. Failure is not an option, insofar as it equals cancellation rather than amalgamation. Lost spacecraft are... ...lost (Mars Observer notwithstanding).

I wish it were otherwise.

Bob Shaw

Oh, I knew an "uprated MRO" with a much fatter data pipe back to Earth wouldn't have been able to serve the same pure telecom purposes as MTO, because of the orbit requirements for doing imaging.

I just want the fatter pipe, is all. After all, we're stuck with something in an MRO-type orbit for MSL's relay, regardless -- if that's all we're going to have, I'd rather have that much fatter pipe on it. Otherwise, we might as well scale back the data gathering capabilities of MSL, 'cause we'll *never* get all the data return that the current design can flood back at us with the pipes that will be available to us.

Had NASA a clue that MTO was going to be canceled, say, a year or two ago, I would have pushed for adjusting the MRO design to allow for at least a *somewhat* fatter pipe back to Earth. The timing of the MTO cancelation, however, made that completely impossible.

-the other Doug

other Doug:

It's still a helluva data rate - with the biggest antenna yet put into Mars orbit (assuming it arrives safely)!

Bob Shaw

Really? Mars Observer was re-flown as Mars Global Surveyor. Mars Climate Orbiter was re-flown as Mars Odyssey. Mars Polar Lander will be re-flown as the Phoenix mission.

Let's see -- of the Mars probes that have been lost over the past dozen years, that leaves Deep Space Two as the only set of flight instruments on a lost spacecraft that haven't had a mission created to allow re-flight.

-the other Doug

other Doug:

No. Individual instruments, yes. The Full Monty (whoops, here comes Phil!), no.

Not only have globally-oriented packages been lost, but we've also lost a decade of time and funding. A loss is a loss, even if back-up instruments are reflown at the cost of another mission.

As for the economics of MPL 2... ...they defy belief!

Bob Shaw

Some comments from Spaceflight Now:

'That first orbit will have a low point of about 186 miles and a high point of nearly 30,000 miles. Over the next six months, MRO's thrusters will fire at the high point of each orbit, setting up repeated low-altitude passes through the planet's extreme upper atmosphere. This aerobraking process will provide the atmospheric friction needed to slowly bleed off energy and circularize the orbit at an altitude of roughly 200 miles.

It is a critical maneuver with little margin for error. NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost during orbit insertion in 1999, victim of an embarrassing navigation error. Richard Zurek was the project scientist then and now.

"You don't want to be a flyby, you want to go into orbit," he said. "We've lost a spacecraft before at this point. So getting into orbit and then going through aerobraking (is difficult). We've got more margin with this spacecraft than with others. The big (solar) arrays give us more area and we've a little more flexible about balancing drag versus heating of the spacecraft."

After fine tuning the final orbit and calibrating MRO's instruments, two years of full-time science observations will begin in November 2006.

"It's going to take us another 16 months before we're really ready to open for business and then that firehose will be ready to start flowing," said Zurek.

The "firehose" is the expected 5.6-megabits-per-second flow of data from MRO's instruments through big dish antenna. "If you want to start an intensive investigation of the planet itself, you have to start increasing your ability to cover vast portions of the surface, you need to increase that coverage and you need to do it at a much higher resolution," said Graf.

"When you couple those two things together, that translates into more and more data. So what we have done is taken a major step forward in the capability of this spacecraft to return data."

The Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey spacecraft currently in orbit around Mars send back data at a few thousand bits per second. With MRO, "we can get upwards of 34 terabtis of data being brought back in our two years of science operations. ... We are going to be awash in data, which will enable us to better understand the planet as a whole."'

Personally, I can hardly wait!

No, MCO had instruments for monitoring weather (MARCI) and PMIRR (Pressure Modulated Infrared Radiometer) from Mars observer. Odyssey, always on the schedule in the surveyor program, has Themis and the Gamma Ray Spectrometer (and Neutron spectrometer included therein). MARCI and PMIRR would not be replicated until MRO, abeit under significantly updated designs, as MARCI (an updated design) and MCS (Mars Climate Sounder, an update version of PMIRR).

"It's going to take us another 16 months before we're really ready to open for business and then that firehose will be ready to start flowing," said Zurek.

16 months

Two months before arriving at Mars, On January, MRO will awake up to take some pictures on during its optical and navigation callibrating process.

Rodolfo

Doug, your figures seems right and I perfectly understand the huge amount of data; my objection wasn't about time needed for data trasmission with radio waves, but the evident need to downlink them with another system...

Anyone catch PI Mike Meyer in an interview on the PBS NewsHour? Jeez the guy is about as enthusiastic as a mortician. I think I'd be just a little more excited if the mission I was head of for the past few years had a flawless launch. Oh well.

The trouble is that the bottleneck in using MRO (and all other low-altitude Mars science orbiters) as com relays is NOT the link back to Earth -- it's the link from the lander to the orbiter. And there is simply no way to reduce that without a (very heavy and untested) laser com system on the lander, because any low-altitude Mars orbiter will soar from horizon to horizon of a landing site in only about 8 minutes. MRO's com link to Earth, at its current speed, is quite adequate to send all the daily information from those brief and infrequent sessions with MSL on to Earth.

Actually, we can go further than that. Phoenix does NOT fully recover MPL's planned science goals -- instead, it was designed to use the same payload, with some augmentations, to achieve NEW science goals which on balance are now considered more important. (And a major factor in the decision to pick Phoenix was the post-MPL discovery by Odyssey of large amounts of near-surface ice at considerable distances from the poles. After that, NASA HQ -- although this has been mostly hushed up -- virtually ordered the "independent" Mars Scout selection board to pick Phoenix.)

To be precise, Phoenix does not inspect the polar layered terrains that MPL was intended to examine. At some point in the not greatly distant future, we will still need to take a look at those.

Is there any chance the MRO is going to use lossy compression to improve the science return? All I can remember reading was about hardware lossless - which is great but with 5.4Mbit/s link and that extraordinary image size I'm not sure that they can get everything back? Wouldn't a very low loss ICER mode be useful - then if you want another look, use the lossless mode? Perhaps in the extended mission they could reprogram the FPGA responsible for this (make a bit more room for MSL telecom...)

Roly

They've already got 2:1 compression there - and they can always nest levels of detail - full res for the middle 4000 pixels, 2x2 binned thereafter etc etc

Doug

Yes, see http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/missio...nal_Atlas_1.jpg
And
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/galler..._fairing_1.html
For a close-up

This was from a University of Arizona news release a couple of weeks ago.

A couple of days ago I installed GoogleEarth on my computer. The views of the Grand Canyon a simple awesome ! I hope that the 3D images of HIRISE could led to an equvalent "GoogleMars" program. The best resolution in GoogleEarth is about 1 feet and HIRISE have the same on Mars !

Robert

Hello,
I was very happy about this great liftoff and success? of MRO.

Can someone tell me how fast MRO will travel to Mars? 16km per hour or more?

How many km is the spacecraft already away from Earth?

Thx

This may have already been asked yet but I was reading some pages on JPLs website about the Centaur upper stage and they indicated that it did a maneuver after jettisoning MRO to avoid hitting MRO or eventually impacting Mars. So does anyone know what happens to it after this maneuver? Does it end up in a wierd high earth orbit? I'm assuming that baring another large burn it would fly out into an outer solar system orbit or possibly (but unlikely due to a lack of velocity) escape the solar system.

The centaur will be in a solar orbit that just about touches the earths orbit at it's low point, and just about touches mars's orbit at another point - 1 x 1.5 AU roughly.

Someone has written a very accurate MRO for Orbiter - and it's about 10.9km/sec immediately after launch, which slows to about 3.8km/sec after a couple of weeks - but it maintains that sort of speed for much of the cruise - it's all very variable though as it's hard to pick a reference point in space ( at least, in Orbiter it is )

From far out - approach to mars is about 4.5km/s - the speed will vary a lot really

Doug

thx, indeed very slow.

I thought modern spacecraft are travelling much faster.

What could be the maximum speed with chemical engines?
30km/sec?

I'd say New Horizon's launch speed is about as fast as you can get reasonably (something like 11 - 12km/sec if my maths are right ) - add on perhaps the delta-v of ion propulsion of another 1 or 2 km/sec and that's about all you can get. That's why fly-bys are used to slingshot trajectories. Casini, Galileo, New Horizons, Rosetta, Stardust, Messenger etc - all getting Delta-V for free with flybys.

Doug

You can see the cruise stage activities and their estimated times by clicking these URL
Cruise Stage activities
Trajectory Correction Maneuvers
Rodolfo

Using orbiter I just managed an aero-capture It would rip the real MRO to pieces, but an altitude of about 40km sees me in a fairly eliptical orbit, and a altitude of 35km sees a fairly good orbit that only requries a few days of aerobraking And you get to keep 95% of your fuel

Doug