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PHOTO CAPTION PIA-03459
2001 Mars Odyssey
October 31, 2001
This thermal infrared image was acquired by Mars Odyssey's
thermal emission imaging system on October 30, 2001, as
the spacecraft orbited Mars on its ninth revolution around
the planet. The image was taken as part of the calibration
and testing process of the camera system.
This image shows the temperature of Mars in one of the 10
thermal infrared filters. The spacecraft was approximately
22,000 kilometers (about 13,600 miles) above the planet
looking down toward the south pole of Mars when this
image was acquired.
It is late spring in the martian southern hemisphere. The
extremely cold, circular feature shown in blue is the martian
south polar carbon dioxide ice cap at a temperature of
about -120 °C (-184 ° F). The cap is more than 900
kilometers (540 miles) in diameter at this time and will
continue to shrink as summer progresses. Clouds of
cooler air blowing off the cap can be seen in orange
extending across the image to the left of the cap. The cold
region in the lower right portion of the image shows the
nighttime temperatures of Mars, demonstrating the
"night-vision" capability of the camera system to observe
Mars even when the surface is in darkness. The warmest
regions occur near local noontime. The ring of mountains
surrounding the 900-kilometer (540-mile) diameter impact
basin Argyre can be seen in the early afternoon in the
upper portion of the image. The thin blue crescent along
the upper limb of the planet is the martian atmosphere.
This image covers a length of over 6,500 kilometers
(3,900 miles) spanning the planet from limb to limb,
with a resolution of approximately 5.5 kilometers per pixel
(3.4 miles per pixel), or picture elements, at the point
directly beneath the spacecraft. The Odyssey's infrared
camera is planned to have a resolution of 100 meters per
pixel (about 300 feet per pixel) from its mapping orbit.
JPL manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's
Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The thermal
emission imaging system was developed at Arizona State
University, Tempe with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote
Sensing, Santa Barbara, Calif. Lockheed Martin Astronautics,
Denver, Colo., is the prime contractor for the project, and
developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are
conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a
division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
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Image credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Arizona State University.
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