To capture a better view of the atmosphere that included layers of clouds and dust, the entire spacecraft needed to roll over onto its side while still keeping its solar panels pointed toward the sun. “There’s a lot of detail you can’t see from above, which is how THEMIS normally makes these measurements.” “I think of it as viewing a cross-section, a slice through the atmosphere,” said Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This team of legged robots could be the future of Mars exploration Perseverance rover catches footage of a dust devil on Mars Map of Mars shows the location of ice beneath the planet’s surface “No Mars spacecraft has ever had this kind of view before.” “If there were astronauts in orbit over Mars, this is the perspective they would have,” said Jonathon Hill of Arizona State University, operations lead for Odyssey’s THEMIS camera, in a statement. It’s taken from about 250 miles above the Martian surface – about the same altitude at which the International Space Station orbits Earth. This unusual view of the horizon of Mars was captured by NASA’s Odyssey orbiter using its THEMIS camera via an operation that took engineers three months to plan. It has also created a global map of the planet’s surface using its Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) instrument. In its over 20 years of operations, the orbiter made key discoveries, including some of the first detections of subsurface ice on the planet. The image was taken by NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since 2001. It is similar to the kinds of views of Earth that astronauts get from the International Space Station, showing what Mars would look like if seen from a similar vantage point. A new image from a NASA orbiter shows an unusual view of Mars that captures the planet’s horizon complete with clouds.
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