Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter closes in on Mars

NASA has notified media sources that their Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is finally closing on its destination and would now be working on completing its goal of finding possible landing sites for future missions.

This aircraft is carrying as many as six scientific instruments and includes a high-end camera built by Ball Corp.’s aerospace unit and the University of Arizona. This component itself costed around USD 31 million to the space center and it would help them photograph the Martian surface in six times greater resolution than ever before.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is also carrying a $17.6 million spectrometer built by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. It would be used to search for minerals that may indicate the past presence of water.

Donna Shirley, who led NASA’s Mars Exploration Program in the mid 1990s said in a statement on this mission: “We’re going to learn a whole lot about Mars. Hopefully, that will tell us something about Earth and that’s what the whole objective is.”

This craft is now scheduled to arrive March 10 with around 26 million kilometers of traveling still to go.