Mars Odyssey Orbiter to Break Space Exploration Record
The old cliché has it that records are made to be broken but this record likely will last for quite some time.
Come next Wednesday, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will have worked longer at the Red Planet than any other spacecraft in history. If you're keeping score, the Odyssey entered Mars' orbit around Mars on Oct. 24, 2001. When it starts its 3,340th day on the job on Dec. 15, it will break the previous record for Martian career longevity record set by its predecessor, Mars Global Surveyor, which operated in orbit from Sept. 11, 1997, to Nov. 2, 2006.
Take your pick as to the Odyssey's most lasting contribution - its extensive images have substantially widened science's knowledge of the planet's map - but high on any list will be the discovery of water ice below the surface of Mars.
"This is really amazing," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona when the discovery was reported in 2002. "This is the best direct evidence we have of subsurface water ice on Mars."
Though scientists had long suspected Mars once was home to large amounts of water, the finding turned up more ice than had been expected. But the discovery raised more questions than it answered. The big one, of course, being what happened to all of that water and what did it suggest about the possibility of life on Mars? Jim Garvin, the Mars Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, put it best: Measuring and mapping the icy soils in the polar regions of Mars as the Odyssey team has done is an important piece of this puzzle, but we need to continue searching, perhaps much deeper underground, for what happened to the rest of the water we think Mars once had."
