Mro On Approach, TCM-3 not required Options

[Redstone]

MRO has shifted from the cruise phase to Approach phase. Apparently, the trajectory is so good that TCM-3 was cancelled. This is good news for the prospects for a long life for MRO supporting future missions. TCM-4 is on Feb 28, and MOI on March 10. Only 5 weeks away!

[The Messenger]

Nice collection of details. Hydrazine (HN#NH) has been the fuel-of-choice for vectoring motors since Minuteman, which also uses the helium replacement system (The helium is stored in donuts wrapped around the nozzles, both cooling the nozzles and heating the replacement gas.) A monofuel allows simple valve trains and combustion chambers. Hydrazine is both toxic and corrosive - not surprising, as are most highly reactive chemicals.

[dilo]

Thanks for resuming all these infos, Rodolfo (perhaps the biggest post I saw in the Forum...).

A couple of considerations on the data storage/transmission.
They say: "Over its two-year primary science mission, the spacecraft is predicted to transmit more than 34 Terabits-that's more than all the data transmitted by all previous JPL spacecraft put together!"
This means an average transmission of 0.54 Mbit/sec if spacecraft is continuosly transmitting (obviously this is not true due to occultation and multiple DSN tasks); this figure is about one eleventh of real MRO antenna data rate (at 100 million Km).
Moreover, is a single image require 28 Gbit, this means only slightly more than 1000 images transmitted during primary mission, about 1.5 images/day...
I know we already spoken about bandwith bottleneck, this is just a remind...