USER MANUAL - MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER (MRO)

From the fascination it has provided the field of astronomy with for centuries, to the secrets it has yielded since the first Mars mission in 1960, the Red Planet remains an elusive and esoteric point in the night sky.

Since the early 1960s, the collective space agencies of the world have launched over 50 missions to the distant world the Romans named after their deity of war. One of those missions - NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) - has just completed its tenth year of groundbreaking study above Mars. Through the lens of its colossal HiRISE camera, we have been able to study the Red Planet like never before and it has radically changed our understanding of this awe-inspiring destination.

Much like many spacecraft before it (and no doubt, those to come after it), the MRO was born out of NASA's ever-evolving mission to study Mars in greater depth. After more than a decade of successful launches, NASA's longstanding Mars Exploration Program (MEP) decided it needed a powerful camera, designed specifically to study Mars's unusual topography and composition.

"The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was designed, built and launched with the key purpose of supporting the MEP in multiple ways," reveals Dr Alfred McEwan, director at the Planetary Research Lab at the University of Arizona and a scientist involved in the MRO programme since its inception. "From the very beginning, we need it to perform the relay of surface assets, perform vital landing site reconnaissance, run important atmospheric studies for EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) and Mars-based science.”

Even before it launched from Cape Canaveral in 2005, it was already turning heads, most notably for the hyperactive speed of its development. Most orbiters take around a decade from design to launch, but for the MRO, that turnaround was positively supersonic. “It was approved back in 2001 and was ready for launch in August 2005,” comments Dr McEwan. “This was very fast compared to the development cycles of today’s NASA.”