Ageing spacecraft makes best-ever map of Mars

Maggie McKee, physical sciences news editor

Chalk one up for the graybeards. The oldest spacecraft now operating around Mars has produced the best ever map of the Red Planet (if the map does not load, heavy traffic may have temporarily crashed the site).

NASA's Mars Odyssey reached the planet in 2001 and researchers have now stitched together 21,000 of its images into a global map. When seen as a whole, the gray-scale map isn't much to look at, but its power snaps into focus when viewers zoom in on particular features, whose details can be seen at scales as small as 100 metres across - see a 140-km-wide image of Mars's "Grand Canyon" below. (Cameras such as HiRISE on the newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can spot things about 1 metre wide, but have covered only small portions of the planet.)

"The map lays the framework for global studies of properties such as the mineral composition and physical nature of the surface materials," says Odyssey scientist Jeffrey Plaut of JPL in a statement.

The new map was released just days after NASA announced that Odyssey had gone into 'standby' mode on 14 July after an electronic component responsible for moving its solar array suffered a glitch. The probe switched to a backup component and returned to work on Friday, but it was not the first sign of trouble for the ageing spacecraft, which was temporarily sidelined due to memory problems in late 2009. If the craft can hang on for another five months or so, it will smash the longevity record for a Martian spacecraft, set by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. That probe orbited the Red Planet for a little over nine years, from September 1997 until November 2006.

(Valles Marineris canyon system image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University)