Mars missions & third chances

You may have seen that a team including Oxford scientists have reported some surprising first results from NASA's Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO) [top image].

What you may not have gathered is that this is third-time lucky for the Oxford team - that they have been trying to get an instrument like the Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) in orbit around the Red Planet for decades. So why the wait?

Well that would be the painful business of Mars Observer and Mars Climate Orbiter: two Mars-bound spacecraft carrying the forerunner of MCS: Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer (PMIRR).

PMIRR was designed to do a similar job to MCS - using infrared sensors to study temperature, dust and humidity in the Martian atmosphere.

Sadly contact with Observer [above] was lost shortly before it was due to go into orbit (1993) while Climate Orbiter [below] tore itself apart in the Martian atmopshere (1999) after being sent in too low due to a mix-up between metric and imperial measurements.

I've blogged about lost Lunar probes and Martian landers before but it's worth sparing a thought for the scientists involved.

Partly due to the lengthy journey time to Mars each failure means a decade of lost research. As Oxford's Fred Taylor told me this third Mars mission was probably his last chance to examine the Martian climate close-up as, by the time data from the next probe was beamed back, he'd have retired!

Thankfully, so far, Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter has been a big success and is enabling scientists to examine the entire Martian atmosphere in detail - something that's not possible to do from any craft on the surface.

There are many fascinating mysteries to investigate: one of them being the strange case of the 'two kinds of years' found on Mars. Fred tells me that that there are significant climatic differences from one year to the next, as if the planet is alternating between two stable year-long climate states.

If, as hoped, the team can study the Martian climate for 4-5 years then they should be able to shed some light on this mysterious 'split personality.'

An exciting decade or more of research lies ahead.

Images: MRO image NASA/JPL-Caltech, other images NASA/MSFC

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