[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Initial parking orbit is good - at last we're off the ground

During ascent I suddenly thought "woh, if this doesnt work - MSL is going to suffer a lot" - and got rather nervous

Not out of the woods yet- another centaur burn to go - and actually, I was suprised to hear that the centaur put the parking orbit perigee about 6 nm off target - that's a lot. Doesnt really matter that much I'd have though - it IS only a parking orbit after all, and it'll probabyl be made up on the second burn

Doug

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[Guest_spaceffm_*]

Hello,
I was very happy about this great liftoff and success? of MRO.

Can someone tell me how fast MRO will travel to Mars? 16km per hour or more?

How many km is the spacecraft already away from Earth?

Thx

[chokai]

This may have already been asked yet but I was reading some pages on JPLs website about the Centaur upper stage and they indicated that it did a maneuver after jettisoning MRO to avoid hitting MRO or eventually impacting Mars. So does anyone know what happens to it after this maneuver? Does it end up in a wierd high earth orbit? I'm assuming that baring another large burn it would fly out into an outer solar system orbit or possibly (but unlikely due to a lack of velocity) escape the solar system.