With NASA's Mars Odyssey safely in orbit, the space agency has selected 10 science payloads to fly on the next orbital mission - the Lockheed Martin-built Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) - to be launched in August 2005. The MRO will be preceded by two Mars Exploration Rovers in 2003.
The payloads are divided into two principal investigator (PI) instruments and eight facility team investigations.
The PI instruments are the $31 million HiRISE ultra-high resolution, multi-colour stereo imaging system developed by the University of Arizona and Ball Aerospace, and CRISM, a hyperspectral imaging spectrometer for mineralogical mapping - a $17.6 million instrument developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to identify key mineralogical indicators of water and hydrothermal systems.
HiRISE will be capable of providing images with six times the resolution of previous Mars orbiters and will be used to further understanding of the surface processes related to water and to locate potential future landing sites.
The other instruments include five that were aboard the Mars Climate Orbiter which failed to orbit Mars in 1999, while the three other new instruments are a shallow-sunsurface sounding radar based on the Italian space agency's flight-proven synthetic aperture radar system, plus gravity and accelerometer payloads.
Source: Flight International
