![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eIt has been probably the most successful and useful science mission sent to Mars so far. Global Surveyor was launched in late 1996 and arrived at Mars almost a year later. It pioneered the use of friction braking by dipping into the top of the Martian atmosphere to slow its orbit and turn it from a long ellipse to an almost circular one, then in April 1999 it set about mapping Mars.
Originally Global Surveyor was designed to operate for just 1 year, but it kept returning such superb results that the project was extended to 2 years. However it still kept on producing brilliant information so in the end its mission kept being extended -- 4 times in all. Now, more than 7 years later it may have finally ended. It may be that a solar panel has become stuck and the little space robot is unable to get enough power to communicate with Earth... nobody is quite sure at the moment. Engineers are going to try sending a command to Global Surveyor to transmit to the little roving robots on the surface of Mars. But it isn't looking good.
This wonderful little orbiting robot has sent back almost quarter of a million detailed images of the surface of Mars, used its mineral-mapping spectrometer to find fine-grained hematite (which usually forms in wet conditions), mapped the topography of Mars in unprecedented detail using its laser altimeter, detected remnant magnetic fields indicating that Mars was once shielded from deadly cosmic rays like Earth, and the very long life has enabled the correlation of observations over repeated annual cycles.
Not bad for a quiet little robot that was intended to work for just a year and was deemed too boring by the conventional press to warrant reports.
Here is a picture sent back by Global Surveyor a couple of days ago of what appear to be river channels running down from a crater edge (on the right of the picture) to the crater floor (on the left). It is in the southern hemisphere and the sun is shining from the top left of the picture. The image is about 3km (1.9 miles) wide. The picture is 2048x3108 pixels and almost 7MB. Each pixel covers about 1 square meter.
Originally Global Surveyor was designed to operate for just 1 year, but it kept returning such superb results that the project was extended to 2 years. However it still kept on producing brilliant information so in the end its mission kept being extended -- 4 times in all. Now, more than 7 years later it may have finally ended. It may be that a solar panel has become stuck and the little space robot is unable to get enough power to communicate with Earth... nobody is quite sure at the moment. Engineers are going to try sending a command to Global Surveyor to transmit to the little roving robots on the surface of Mars. But it isn't looking good.
This wonderful little orbiting robot has sent back almost quarter of a million detailed images of the surface of Mars, used its mineral-mapping spectrometer to find fine-grained hematite (which usually forms in wet conditions), mapped the topography of Mars in unprecedented detail using its laser altimeter, detected remnant magnetic fields indicating that Mars was once shielded from deadly cosmic rays like Earth, and the very long life has enabled the correlation of observations over repeated annual cycles.
Not bad for a quiet little robot that was intended to work for just a year and was deemed too boring by the conventional press to warrant reports.
Here is a picture sent back by Global Surveyor a couple of days ago of what appear to be river channels running down from a crater edge (on the right of the picture) to the crater floor (on the left). It is in the southern hemisphere and the sun is shining from the top left of the picture. The image is about 3km (1.9 miles) wide. The picture is 2048x3108 pixels and almost 7MB. Each pixel covers about 1 square meter.
