[X] My Assistant

[Floyd]

Steve Squyres reports in Mission Update

December 7, 2006

A very quick update: We just learned this morning that the Mars Odyssey spacecraft has gone into "safe mode". This is something that can happen when there's a glitch of some sort on board the spacecraft... it puts itself into a very safe state and waits for commands from Earth. Mars Odyssey appears to be in great shape and should be back in business in a few days. A likely cause of the event was a big blast of high-energy particles from the Sun that got to Mars right before it happened. So there doesn't appear to be anything to worry about, and both rovers came through the particle event unscathed. But because we relay most of our data through Mars Odyssey, we won't see very much data from the rovers until Odyssey is back online.


Posted previously by nprev on the Solar Activity thread.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Just thinking the unthinkable here. What if NASA were to lose Odyssey. Would MRO be able to take over data relay at this stage of it's mission? Would it impact MRO's mission too much?

I would think it wouldn't take up too much of the spacecraft's resources transmitting a few dozen images per day, that data volume is tiny compared to a single HiRISE image, but the rover to orbiter relay might?

[djellison]

Would MRO be able to take over data relay at this stage of it's mission?

Yes

Would it impact MRO's mission too much?

A bit - the limiting factor is probably the manhours involved in writing the sequences to do the relay. Consider that a good MER UHF relay pass is 100 Mbits. I'm not sure about the size of the average HiRISE observation, but it's going to be an order of magnitude or two more than that. Even at the lowest normal data rate, 100 Mbits is less than 4 minutes of MRO downlink - so say three passes per day ( one per rover, plus a second on one rover...about average I think) , 12 minutes out of a near 24 hour downlink schedule. 1%. Get to closest approach and it's more like 0.1% of the downlink.

Doug