Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 12, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
Page 6

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REAL LIFE NEWS: MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER ARRIVES

NASA's latest mission to Mars has arrived safely and is now in orbit around the red planet - much to the relief of the mission team at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, after two of the last four orbiters sent to Mars by NASA didn't survive the final approach. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) arrived on Friday, approaching the south side of the planet then firing its engines to slow its speed and allow itself to be capture by Mars' gravity.

It's now in an elliptical orbit around the planet, taking 35 hours to complete one circuit; at its furthest point it will swing out to 27,000 miles above the planet's surface. The next phase of the mission involves slowly shrinking the MRO's path until it achieves a tight, circular, two-hour orbit. It'll do this using aerobraking, where the spacecraft slows down by using the friction each time it brushes past the Martian atmosphere. The process will take six months, and MRO will perform this technique more than 500 times.

The spaceways around Mars must be getting crowded now; Reconnaissance joins three other satellites, the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, both sent by NASA, and the European Space Agency's Mars Express.

Once it's in place, which it should be by next November, the MRO can start doing its stuff. It carries six different scientific instruments, and is equipped with cameras capable of taking close-up images of the Martian surface. The aim of the mission is to build up a detailed picture of how Mars has changed over the millenia - whether there were once rivers or oceans, and what its climate was once like. The NASA mission team says that MRO will return ten times more data than all of the previous Mars missions put together. It will also locate landing sites for future Martian rovers.

For more information and to see some pictures, go to NASA's MRO web site.


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