Z = GMT / UT, P = Pacific
Future, Unconfirmed, Confirmed

NASA TV coverage starts at 2030Z / 1230P

TCM5 was not required.
2049Z / 1249P - Tank Pressurize - nominal pressure reported (@2053Z)
2103Z / 1303P - Switch to LGA ( 2 way doppler @ 2104Z, Lock at 160bps :2105Z)
2107Z / 1307P - Turn to Burn attitude (start of turn confirmed via doppler & telem @2110Z - Slew finished @2119Z via ACS)
2124Z / 1324P - Start of MOI Burn (confirmed via Doppler @2123Z )
(tank pressure about 3psi below predicts but within margins @2131Z )
(307m/sec accumulated delta @2135Z)
(401m/sec accumulated delta @2139Z)
(588m/sec accumualted delta @2144Z)
(telem. indicated eclipse entry @2146Z)
2146Z / 1346P - Loss of signal ( confirmed on doppler @2147Z- actual time 21:46:23Z)
2151Z / 1351P - Nominal End of Burn
2216Z / 1416P - Nominal AOS - (signal aquired - 1 way doppler @2116Z - 22:16:08 actual time)
(2 way doppler @2223Z)
2230Z / 1430p - 1641m/s burn indicated by telementry.

MRO is now orbiting the planet Mars

Status check at 2245Z
Flight Software - Burn done at 20% Utilisation
Prop Nominal
ACS, Earth point on reaction wheels, Star tracker aquisition ( 8 stars ), Burn time 1641 seconds vs 1606 expected. 1000.48 m/s compared to 1000.36m/s expected.
Thermal - all temps nominal. A few alarms due to soak back from the rcs thrusters.
EPS - Nomincal, trickle charging batts ( 110% state of charge ) - 870 Watts being used, 1650 Watts available from arrays.
Telecom - Nominal, on primary equipment, uplink and downlink signals as expected, already got a command in.
Fault Prot - Quicklook, no abnormal responses to the burn, out of go-fast mode.
Nominal termination to the MOI nominal block.






http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/realtime/mro-doppler_lg.html
Interesting Pre MOI PDF Presentation
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/smadir/hq06/landano.pdf



11th March 0030 Press Conf Update

Usual superlatives from senior management that don't tell us anything.

Jim Graff acknowledged help from NOAA w.r.t. Solar Weather, and the DSN's outstanding job.
Howard Eisan : MRO is safe, stable, on earth point, transmitting at 550kbps. We've earned the 'RO' of MRO. Dippled less than 10% into the batteries, commanded velocity change 2237.6 mph, overshot by 0.4mph, during the burn we underperformed by 2%, burned by 33 seconds longer to make up the difference. First hr of Nav data - orbit 35.5 hrs (predict 35.6) 264 x 28,000 mile orbit.
Rich Zurek : 2 of our 8 investigations were ones lost with MCO, one of those was also lost with Mars Observer. This completes replacement of all the Mars Observer instrumentation. We're going to knock your socks off - it's a good day.

Sally from TPS : Break for 2 weeks, what are you going to be doing (are you going to be celebrating for two weeks) - JG - stand down for w'end for a rest. Then prepare for aerobraking. ORT for Aerobraking, reconfig spacecraft for aerobraking, and some software patches to send up (9 uploaded to date, a few more to go). One other thing - we will take some early images - engineering images not science quality, make sure they work properly, processing that data on the ground to make sure the processing centres can extract the images from the data.

Sally asked when that science will start. RZ mentioned the use of aerobraking (lowest altitude is 60 miles) to understand structure of atmosphere. Sally asked if aerobraking is hard every orbit. RZ said that most of the closest approaches will be over the south pole. They dont expect big dust storms.

That's all the questions- again, kudos to Sally for asking them something. Unarguably the most important moment in Mars exploration since MER landing and potentially more important than anything between then and MSL landing scientifically, and in terms of infrastructure on orbit - $700M's worth of project - and that's three conferences where Sally was almost the only person to ask any questions. Either JPL PAO has furning the media with every single piece of information they could want before the event, or the media seem to be barely taking note of the mission because it's not as sexy as a landing ( there were plenty of spare seats in the V.K. auditorium, at Spirit's landing conf, you couldnt swing a cat in there ). Under-representation of mission rant over.

Doug

From the press conference:

Contingency TCM-5 cancelled, as expected.
Good weather expected at DSN sites, so good communications expected.

Vehicle current mass is 4784 lbs, down 22 lbs from launch. 60lbs saved over the cruise which works out to 7 months operations at the end of the mission. Today 2/3 of the fuel will be consumed, about 1726 lbs.

Interestingly the 6 TCM engines fire along with the 6 main engines for most of the burn.

EDIT: some other notes:
MRO can underburn by 12% or overburn by 28% and still make Mars orbit. (I think I remember those numbers right.)
The fault protection system is not suppressed (like it was on Cassini), allowing the orbiter primary string to access all assets on the fully redundant string.
After Acquisition of Signal, ground will need about 5 minutes of telemetry to learn about the burn. 30 minutes of tracking to get an orbit solution.
MRO fault protection sequence, including shifting communication modes, takes 14 minutes. The ground will let it do so twice (so about half an hour) before taking any steps.

From JPL Horizons, I prefer Orbiter UTC, so no Earth-received, no time zones, longitudes are areocentric:

2006-03-10 21:21:14, alt = 1000 km, lat = 73° S, lon = 285° E
2006-03-10 21:22:03, alt = 900 km, lat = 76° S, lon = 282° E
2006-03-10 21:22:57, alt = 800 km, lat = 80° S, lon = 278° E
2006-03-10 21:23:55, alt = 700 km, lat = 83° S, lon = 268° E
2006-03-10 21:25:02, alt = 600 km, lat = 86° S, lon = 232° E
2006-03-10 21:26:21, alt = 500 km, lat = 85° S, lon = 155° E
2006-03-10 21:28:09, alt = 400 km, lat = 78° S, lon = 130° E
2006-03-10 21:31:20, alt = 329 km, lat = 63° S, lon = 120° E

Interesting to say the least.

Google's a powerfull little sod sometimes.

Doug

Coming up on pressurization...

And its confirmed!!

You could tell from the team reaction that this was a big deal. Sounds like there was a contingency plan, which has just been happily tossed in the bin.

Overheard ironic quote: "Well, that was easy!"

Overheard on NASA-TV: "That was easy!"

All four pyros fired as expected. Pressurized on the main system.

Slew to burn attitude has begun. It takes 12 minutes. Thats a sloooowww turn.

Spacecraft performance nominal, all subsystems green...

Burn, baby, burn !! Yeeehaaaah !!

Here we go! All 6 engines up and running.

Aaaand it's gone! Half an hour to wait...

Now for the REALLY scary part...

Can anyone tell me what's AOS.

AOS = Acquision of Signal

Acquisition of signal

Did I hear correctly? There was a 1% under- or overburn? Either is within the acceptable margin, though.

acquisition of signal

Hello, About the graph Mars Reconnaisence Orbiter Doppler, what is referring the y-axis (from 10,000 at the top and -90,000 at the bottom)?

Rodolfo

1 % underburn due to lower temperatures and hence lower pressures in the prop system, I think.

Well - until AOS we're not going to know are we? The burn finished 'in the blind' from our perspsective. It might have been performing slightly under, but the spacecraft was counting delta-V, not seconds, so it should have just burnt 1% longer.

Doug

Presumably Doppler shift in Hz.

mro website dead?

Will we know if it's OK AT the moment of signal appearance or does the orbit assesment needs to be done first to be sure ?

Only 5 minutes away to wait about the AOS millestone!

Rodolfo

New edit: plus about 13 minutes of lag time so it is 18 minutes later.

Marcel, a signal means the spacecraft is healthy. They'll need 5 minutes of telemetry to get basic details on the burn. Need 30 minutes or so to get a fix on the resulting orbit.

We're ready MRO!

NASA TV feed wow they look tense

AOS !!!!!!!

yay

One-way contact!

AOS!

hushed yaaaaay! (still at work! )

GET IN

"nice prop system dude!" "right on the money!"

Exit of Mars but we are going to know an official message by 5:30 pm EST (they knew it before than 5:30, at around 5:28 pm...watch out about the Control climate at NASA TV)

Rodolfo

A LITTLE STEP FOR GOOD NEWS : DSN has catched MRO

2219 GMT (5:19 p.m. EST)

Deep Space Network tracking stations in Madrid, Spain and Goldstone, California have locked on the spacecraft's signal. It will take a few minutes for enough data to be received from the spacecraft via the low-data rate to determine state of health and the orbit achieved.

Rodolfo

wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooyay !!!!!!!!

Orbit! Congratulations!

"we actually earned our 'O' today"

2-Way Doppler, MRO is in orbit around Mars

4 orbiters and 2 landers operating at mars at the same time !
What a pleasant day !

-- Rakhir

2-way Doppler

MRO is in orbit!

Orbit insertion OK

Doug, perhaps you need to insert a couple of terabytes of memory in this forum's server to accommodate the HIRISE extravaganza we can now expect.

Peter

2225 GMT (5:25 p.m. EST)

IN ORBIT! The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is truly an orbiter now after successfully swooping into orbit around the Red Planet today, mission control confirms!


WAW MRO IS ALREADY IN ORBIT

Rodolfo

Wahoo! I guess it's better to slightly underburn than overburn, since the aerobraking seems to have more variables to it, and it's always better to have more fuel than less fuel to correct the orbit. I'd imagine this won't add any extra time to the 6 month trim manuvers?

Time to celebrate another great day on mars! At this rate, JPL will need to add traffic control operations for mars.

mental image of 3 or 4 rovers jostling to take pictures of an interesting rock...

I can breathe again!

Congratulations to the JPL for another amazing mission!! 3 orbiters! 2 rovers!! Bravo!

Burn time 1641 seconds vs 1606 expected. 1000.48 m/s compared to 1000.36m/s expected.

So burn performance 97.87% of nominal, but actual Delta V 100.012% of predicted.

i.e. yes - the burn was a little under the mark, but the onboard sequence saw this, worked off the Delta V, and terminated the burn according to the accumulated Delta V hitting the right mark.

Doug

M-R-O-O-O-o-o-o-o!