NASA Releases New Mars Images

NASA has made available 10,230 new images of the planet Mars.

Posted by Tormod
08 April, 2001 08:49:27

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The latest release boosts to more than 67,500 the total number of pictures taken by cameras aboard the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and released to the public.

NASA successfully launched another Martian satellite, the Mars Odyssey, on Saturday. The probe will join Surveyor in orbit around Mars this October.

Until then, Surveyor will remain the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's lone operational spacecraft at Mars, a title it has held since the Pathfinder mission ended in September 1997.

NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander missions both failed in 1999.

The new Surveyor images, which cover a period through August, are available on the Internet, so armchair explorers can peruse much of the data available to planetary scientists.

The Surveyor spacecraft has returned more data from Mars than all other missions to the planet combined. NASA hopes the satellite will remain operational through January 2004, when engineers will use it to relay commands to twin rovers slated to land on the planet.

Mars Global Surveyor was launched on Nov. 7, 1996, and arrived at Mars on Sept. 12, 1997. It has since completed about 11,000 orbits of the Red Planet.