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Projects: Mars Climate Sounder Team Website

Mars Climate Sounder Captures Views of Other Instruments

Data acquired March 24-25, 2006

Click to enlarge > Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Just two weeks after arriving at Mars, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured what may be the first-ever self-portrait from a planetary orbiter.  The snapshot was not taken by any of the orbiter's cameras; it came from Mars Climate Sounder.

Before aerobraking began, a few of the instruments, including Mars Climate Sounder and HiRISE (the high-resolution camera), were powered on to perform some preliminary observations.  The data captured by Mars Climate Sounder included views of the orbiter's instrument deck, encompassing many of the instruments and one of the solar panels.  Although the black-and-white image above looks like a photo, it wasn't taken in wavelengths of light visible to human eyes.  The instrument deck was in shadow when the data was captured, so the view looks black in visible wavelengths.  The brightness and darkness of the pixels in this image represents thermal radiation -- heat -- coming off the objects in view of Mars Climate Sounder.  The images below are colorized to help illustrate the temperature differences.

Click to enlarge > Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter instrument deck (channel B1) Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

This view was captured in a mid-infrared wavelength of 32.5 microns.  At the bottom of the view is the spacecraft instrument deck, which is below the MCS instrument.  Mars would be above the view but is not visible here.  There is a sharp and obvious boundary between the slightly warm instrument deck and the blackness of space.  The instrument deck has a square shape, which is distorted in this angular-space view into a cusp shape.

What are all the lumps and bumps?  On the extreme left, half of the CRISM spectrometer is visible.  CRISM has an aperture that is cylindrical in shape and projects approximately vertically from the instrument deck.  Close to the deck is a fan-shaped cooler that makes a blue bulge.  The bright green blob below that is the CRISM electronics box.

The darker blue pyramid-shaped object to the right of CRISM is one corner of the spacecraft.  An attitude thruster is mounted on the corner and is covered by a thermal blanket.

In the center of the image is the skinny projection of the MARCI context imaging camera.

The large shape to the right of center is composed of two separate objects.  In the foreground is the mostly blue Electra radio antenna.  It is largely blocking a view of one of the two solar panels.

At the far right is the large cylindrical body of the HiRISE camera.  At the moment that this image was taken, HiRISE was powered on.  Three small struts support HiRISE's secondary mirror.  When HiRISE is in use, these struts are heated to a specific temperature in order to make sure that they maintain a constant and known length.  Those heated struts form the hottest pixels in this thermal image.

Click to enlarge > Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter instrument deck (channel A2) Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

This view, captured in a wavelength of 15.8 microns, appears very similar to the 32.5-micron view, but there are a few interesting differences.  First of all, it was captured through the other "eye" of the MCS instrument.  MCS contains two telescopes mounted side-by-side, called Telescopes A and B.  They are coaligned so that when the instrument looks at distant Mars, both telescopes capture the same fields of view.  However, in this unusual image, MCS is looking at objects so close to it that there is parallax between views from the two eyes.  The most obvious effect of parallax is that in the 15.8-micron image from Telescope A, much more of the solar panel is peeking out from behind the Electra antenna than is visible in the Telescope B image.

Click to enlarge > Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter instrument deck - blink comparison Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Another difference is that the entire bottom of this image, corresponding to angles immediately above the MCS instrument, is a solid color.  That's because there is a solar calibration target for the broadband visible channel of the MCS instrument located above telescope A.  Because the broadband visible channel is located in only telescope A and not telescope B, the calibration target was built only to cover the aperture of telescope A.  The other telescope has no such calibration target (its channels are calibrated by pointing at the blackbody targets alone).

Click to enlarge > Parts of Mars Climate Sounder Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech