The Mars Odyssey spacecraft fine-tuned its flight path for arrival at Mars in October as it performed its second trajectory correction maneuver on July 2. Mars Odyssey at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All science payloads have been checked out and are operating well. The Odyssey flight team, he said, is now turning its focus to preparations for Mars orbit insertion and aerobraking, in which repeated passage through the upper atmosphere of the planet will be used to adjust the spacecraft's orbit. Last week, the team opened the door on the gamma ray spectrometer, managed by the University of Arizona in Tucson, and started taking data with the gamma sensor head.
Initial data indicate that the detector performance is excellent.
18 NASA officials said the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is in excellent health as engineers continue to check out and evaluate the performance of its systems and science instruments during its early cruise phase. Friday morning, June 15, flight controllers successfully conducted a visible imaging calibration test of the thermal emission imaging system by pointing the instrument at a star, Menkent, and taking several pictures. Also last week, engineers began a process of heating the gamma ray spectrometer detector in order to erase radiation damage that has naturally occurred to the detector thus far during cruise. The detector will then be in an optimal state to collect science data once the gamma sensor head door is opened later this month. Earlier this month, engineers successfully tested the UHF radio system by sending and receiving data via the 46-meter UHF antenna at Stanford University in California.