The
Mars Global Surveyor is a
project launched into
outer space by
NASA in
1996. This little
satellite is
robust in
design, since there are
currently no means for a manned
mission to fix any
problems. This
craft carries nice
cameras and has nice
bandwidth to get the
info back to
the home planet.
From the JPL website:
During those two years, transmission rates as fast as 85,333 bits per second will allow Mars Global Surveyor's six main scientific instruments to send nearly 83 gigabytes of data back to Earth. (whoa).
Also on
board are these
items:
LASER altimiter,
magnetometer,
electron reflecto
meter,
thermal emission spectrometer.
The "
completion" of the mission was
scheduled for
January of
2000.
Recently, however (
May 22, 2000), NASA released
20,
000 new
photographs, and the
surveyor is showing no signs of
stopping.
This project was one of NASA's
new "
cheap and
effective"
space missions.
it's a shame they lost the lander, though...