NASA spacecraft reaches orbit around Mars

By Dan Whitcomb

PASADENA, California (Reuters) – A $450 million NASA
spacecraft achieved orbit around Mars on Friday, successfully
completing a make-or-break maneuver in its two-year mission to
scour the red planet for evidence of life and landing spots for
future astronauts.

Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena erupted in loud cheers when the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter signaled it had dropped into a perfect orbit around a
planet that has defeated most of the probes sent there.

“We are in orbit around Mars,” a NASA commentator announced
amid jubilation in the control room shortly before 2:30 p.m.

PST (2230 GMT).

The spacecraft, which left Earth in August on its 306
million-mile journey, will spend the next six months using the
drag of Mars’ atmosphere to reel itself in from an elongated
35-hour loop to a nearly circular two-hour orbit.

It will then begin its primary scientific mission.

To ease into orbit around Mars, the ship was required to
turn its main thrusters forward and fire them for 27 minutes,
effectively slamming on the brakes while cruising at more than
11,000 mph (17,600 kph).

The orbit insertion burn began on schedule at 1:24 p.m. PST
and about an hour later the ship, which lost contact with NASA
when it went behind Mars, regained contact with Earth and
signaled that it was on course.

If the spacecraft had failed to achieve orbit it would have
flown past Mars and off into space — a fate that befell a
probe Japan sent in 1998.

Japanese mission controllers managed to gain control of the
Nozomi orbiter and send it back toward Mars, but it was damaged
by solar flares and ultimately lost.

The most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet,
NASA’s orbiter is designed to spend two years searching for
signs of life on Mars and scouting possible landing spots for
astronauts. It is equipped to send back 10 times as much data
as all previous probes put together.

But missions to Mars have proven notoriously difficult,
with two of the last four attempts by NASA to put a spacecraft
in orbit around the planet ending in failure. Only about
one-third of humanity’s probes to Mars have succeeded.

“Mars is just for some reason harder to get a mission to
than other places in the solar system,” lead mission planner
Rob Lock said. “I might even use the word ‘unluckier’ because
there’s nothing intrinsically more difficult than other
planets.”

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter program was expected to
cost a total of about $720 million, including $450 million for
the spacecraft and its on-board instruments, $90 million for
the launch and $180 million for mission operations, science
processing and support.