[meteorite-list] Ground-Piercing Radar on NASA Mars Orbiter Ready for Work

[Ron Baalke]

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Dwayne Brown/Erica Hupp 202-358-1726/1237							
NASA Headquarters, Washington 						 

News Release: 2006-109 			September 19, 2006     

Ground-Piercing Radar on NASA Mars Orbiter Ready for Work

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has extended the long-
armed antenna of its radar, preparing the instrument to 
begin probing for underground layers of Mars.

The orbiter's Shallow Subsurface Radar, provided by the 
Italian Space Agency, will search to depths of about one 
kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) to find and map layers 
of ice, rock and, if present, liquid water. 

The radar's antenna had remained safely folded and tucked 
away throughout the flight to Mars from Aug. 12, 2005, to 
March 10, 2006, and while the orbiter used the friction 
of dipping into the top of Mars' atmosphere 426 times in 
the past six months to shrink the size of its orbit.  
Latches on the restraints were popped open on Sept. 16, 
and the spring-loaded twin arms of the antenna unfolded 
themselves. Subsequent information from the spacecraft 
indicates that each arm properly extended to its 5 meter 
(16.4 feet) length.

"The deployment of the antenna has succeeded. It went 
exactly as planned," said Dr. Enrico Flamini, the Italian 
Space Agency's program manager for the Shallow Subsurface 
Radar. "Now the excitement builds about what the radar 
will find hiding beneath the surface of Mars."

A radar-team engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 
Pasadena, Calif., Ali Safaeinili, said, "Motion sensors 
on Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter gave us good evidence that 
the antenna had deployed successfully.  The amount of 
antenna vibrations as the arms unfolded was within the 
range anticipated."

The radar received its first radio echo from the Martian 
surface during a test on Sept.18, providing a preliminary 
indication that the entire instrument is working properly. 
Researchers will use the instrument for more test 
observations at the end of this month. Communication 
with all spacecraft at Mars will be intermittent during 
most of October while that planet is behind the sun from 
Earth's perspective. The two-year-long main science phase 
of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission will begin in 
November.

"We will use the Shallow Radar to map buried channels, to 
study the internal structure of ice caps and to see 
boundaries between layers of different materials," said 
Dr. Roberto Seu of the University of Rome La Sapienza, 
leader of the instrument's science team. "The data will 
provide our first detailed look just under the Martian 
surface, where ices might reside that would be accessible 
for future explorers."

The radar instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 
will complement a similar instrument that went into use 
last year on the European Space Agency's Mars Express 
orbiter, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and 
Ionospheric Sounding. The two instruments use different 
radar frequencies.  The one on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 
can discriminate between thinner layers, but cannot 
penetrate as deep underground, compared with the one on 
Mars Express. Both result from Italian and American 
partnership in using radar for planetary probes.

Alcatel Alenia Spazio-Italia, in Rome, is the Italian 
Space Agency's prime contractor for the instrument. Astro 
Aerospace, of Carpineria, Calif., a business unit of Los 
Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp., developed the 
antenna as a subcontractor to Alcatel Alenia.

Further information about the Shallow Subsurface Radar 
is online at www.sharad.org . For more detailed 
information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, see 
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main .  The mission is 
managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute 
of Technology, Pasadena, for the NASA Science Mission 
Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, 
Denver, is the prime contractor and built the orbiter. 

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