AN ODYSSEY OF EXPLORATION

It\'s been a great year \-- a very satisfying year for Mars Odyssey.  We
completed our primary mission after two years (over one full Mars year)
of mapping, we\'ve acquired a tremendous amount of data on the thermal
properties, the radiation environment, and the composition of the
surface.

We look at the planets to help understand our own, and where our place
is in the universe and the solar system.  We\'ve been tantalized by the
fact that life may have arose there.  And if it arose, is it still
there?  And if it\'s not there, what happened to it and is there any
remains of it?

When you consider all the other billions and billions of stars, there
must be other planets out there that aren\'t too different from Earth. 
Maybe they do have life on it, maybe life didn\'t exist for very long
\-- we don\'t really know what\'s going on.  Mars, of course, is very
close to us and may help us answer some of those philosophical questions
that we sometimes just dream about.

I got interested in Mars when I was a kid.  My mom bought me a telescope
when I was about 12 years old, and I\'ve been looking at Mars ever
since.  I was fascinated just because it was this tiny little place a
long way away, and people were trying to speculate what it was like.  So
all my life I\'ve been trying to take better and better pictures and get
closer and closer to help sort of imagine what it would be like to
actually walk around on that planet.

BETTER AND BETTER PICTURES

The camera on Mars Odyssey is called THEMIS, and it actually is two
cameras in one.  It\'s a visible light camera, taking pictures like you
would see with your eye, and it\'s also an infrared camera.  So we\'re
able to really learn a lot about the composition of the surface \-- what
minerals make up the surface.  It\'s really a powerful tool, and we\'ve
created now two maps \-- one in the daytime and one in the nighttime \--
each of which is the highest-resolution global map ever acquired at
Mars.

THEMIS is two cameras in one, and we have to actually figure out when to
turn them on, so we built a targeting tool, called JMARS, and we use it
for all of our THEMIS operations.  And right now, our education group
has a huge number of K-12 students that use this tool every day for
remote learning about Mars.  A large number of Mars scientists use it as
well, because it tends to work for both.

A big part of the Mars program is that we bring current data, coming
down from

Mars, to students around the country.  The Mars Student Imaging Project
allows students from fifth grade, all the way up through community
college to learn the process of science in a first-hand way.  They get
to propose a science question \-- all science begins with a question. 
Their team gets to pick some place on Mars that they get to take a
picture.  We teach them how to use our targeting tool \-- the real tool
that our scientists use.  They get to target that image, they get that
image back from the spacecraft, *they* get to do the analysis, and
*they* get to tell NASA what they discovered.  The same thing that our
scientists are doing, these kids are doing in real time also.

One of the things we really wanted to do on the Odyssey mission is share
some of the excitement we have for Mars, and to that end, we created
this software, the THEMIS Image Scroller, and we ship this out to
museums across the country.  We have images of every Martian landform
imaginable \-- from canyons to craters, to polar ice caps and channels
\-- and we present them all literally only a few days after we\'ve
collected them.  People can really do science, if you will, at the same
time we are doing it.

BURIED TREASURE

Often I\'m asked, \"Why is it we\'re interested in studying Mars?\" and
of course one of the aspects is in comparison to the Earth.  Really in a
sense, it\'s like a laboratory where different processes have been going
on, and we can study them to get a better understanding of the processes
going on on Earth.

So, originally we decided to send a gamma ray spectrometer to Mars
because it was going to map the different elements as they appear on the
surface of the planet.  So we could tell where iron was located, where
silicon\...different elements in the periodic table.  One of the most
interesting one that we were hopeful to find would be hydrogen.  And
that\'s because hydrogen, of course, is tied up mostly in different
forms of water, and water is really an essential building block of life.

It turns out, after we got there we were very surprised \-- we found far
more water than we ever expected.  It was all located in the polar
regions, so it was very cold \-- it was in the form of ice \-- and
people hadn\'t seen it before because it was buried just beneath the
surface.  But the gamma rays can actually \...they\'re somewhat like
x-rays, that they can penetrate other materials so we can actually see
right through the dust that\'s on top of it.

The key thing about this data set that\'s fantastic, is that for the
first time we can actually see what\'s happening, in a sense, in the
polar night.  All of our other data has been visual, and we get limited
information about what\'s going on.

What our data are telling us is that water is in sufficient abundance on
Mars that what we see, which is the upper meter of the surface \-- which
is something like that \-- contains enough water if you sum over the
whole planet to make a layer of water, covering the whole planet,
that\'s about ankle-high.  And that seems like a small amount of water,
but it\'s going to pool in places and it can exist below the surface. 
And if it is below the surface, then there\'s considerably more water
than what we see.

In the future, when we get to the point of human exploration, we\'re
going to have to choose locations where there is water that can be
extracted.  It\'s a long way to get to Mars, and there\'s no possible
way to take the quantities of water that you would need for the duration
of your visit.  It\'s definitely going to be a driving factor in terms
of where human exploration would start.

PREPARING FOR HUMAN EXPLORATION

When people go to Mars, or other places in deep space, they\'re going to
be exposed to significantly more radiation than we get here on the
surface of the Earth.  So we need to understand exactly what radiation
dose people are going to get.

We\'re using Mars Odyssey to monitor the hazards that astronauts might
experience on a trip to Mars.

We got a year-and-a-half worth of good data out of MARIE, and we were
able to make the determination that the radiation levels were about as
expected, two to three times greater that in Earth orbit.  On Earth,
we\'ve got a very thick atmosphere, and that stops a great deal of the
radiation that comes in.  We\'ve also got a magnetic field, and that
causes particles to be deflected toward the poles.  If you had the MARIE
instrument in Earth orbit \-- and we do, in a sense, because we\'ve got
a very similar instrument on the space station \-- it records levels
that are about half as high as what MARIE saw.

\[\"Radiation console\...yes\...\"\]

What we\'re doing here is basically monitoring the radiation environment
at the International Space Station.  We do that a couple of different
ways: we\'re monitoring output from the sun, and then also sort of the
natural galactic background.  For example, if you look here, you see
this green and blue set of lines.  This represents a solar event, and if
levels reach certain values, then we ask the crew to seek more sheltered
areas in the space station, or we can change the timing of what they\'re
going to do and when \-- maybe not do an EVA or go outside the vehicle,
depending on what\'s going on.

In order to go to Mars \-- to put people on the Martian soil \-- then
all of these kinds of technologies and all of the things we do here are
going to have to be probably expanded significantly and then adapted to
that kind of arena.

As we move towards expanding the number of places that we go in the
solar system, we\'ll be going places where the Earth-bound satellites
don\'t give us the information we need.  So what we\'ll have to have is
a network of monitors all around the solar system so that people can be
on the other side of the Sun from where Earth is, and we\'ll still have
monitoring capability, and warning capability, most importantly, to tell
them \"Yes, a big event is headed your way.  You\'d better take
shelter.\"

I came into working on the MARIE project under kind of sad
circumstances, because Gautam Badhwar, who worked in space radiation for
his entire, distinguished career, unfortunately died shortly after
Odyssey was on its way to Mars.

We are sorry we lost Dr. Badhwar on the way to Mars.  He was a very
humble man, and we definitely learned \-- every day working with him was
a learning experience.  The one thing I remember the most about him is
that he always made us feel like equals.  He saw MARIE function during
the cruise phase, but never during orbit, and this is his brainchild. 
We were hoping he\'d be around to see it, but we have great scientists
right now that are working on the team and filling his shoes, and it
took\...this was a truly a team effort between science and engineering
in many organizations.  It can be used as an example of cooperation
between cities, states and different organizations \-- a good lesson to
learn from and apply on other projects and other tasks.

Having a successful mission like Mars Odyssey requires the efforts of
literally hundreds of people.  A lot of people who you never see, behind
the scenes, are doing just a great job to get the commands up to the
spacecraft, \[\"copy that\...thanks\"\]  to do the data handling, to
monitor the health of the instruments and all the systems on board
\[\"Data Control\...Odyssey Ace\...\"\].  These people don\'t get the
credit, but they really deserve it, because on our project we have just
had a fantastic team.  They\'ve done a great job for us, and it\'s
really a tribute to their efforts that we\'ve been so successful.

The Odyssey project looks like it\'s going to be a long term project. 
Serving the role as landing site scout, and now lander relay
platform\...

The highlight of our operations over the past year really has been our
support for the Mars Exploration Rovers.  Almost all of the data that
has come the rovers on the surface has come through Odyssey, and we\'re
very proud to have provided that type of support for the rovers.

Our performance to date has been just wonderful, and we believe that the
spacecraft will be sort of a cornerstone in the infrastructure of the
Mars Exploration Program for a long, long, time.