Nasa's Mars Orbiter is on a roll
What is the Mars Orbiter?
The orbiter has been circling Mars since 2006.It's original mission was to search for evidence of water on Mars' surface, but after it completed that two-year mission, Nasa decided it was doing such a good job they extended it.It has now spent years doing things like monitoring how Mars changes through the seasons, and searching the planet for places for human-made objects like the Perseverance rover to land.
How does the Mars orbiter roll?
Teaching the orbitor to get better at rolling isn't as simple as you might think.MRO could always move a bit side to side but not too much because it has lots of different scientific instruments on board. These don't all point the same way, so when MRO moves to focus one instrument on one thing, the other instruments can go out of whack. Experts have compared it to turning your head to look at something while trying to hear or smell something, somewhere else, at the same time. So to do a successful and useful roll the computer had to given a complex set of instructions to follow so everything could still work together.The plan isn't to do too many of these stunts in but it shows that even after more than ten years in space, Nasa are still finding new jobs for their travelling machines, far off in the solar system.
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