'There's a lot of detail you can't see from above, which is how THEMIS normally makes these measurements.īecause THEMIS can't pivot, adjusting the angle of the camera requires adjusting the position of the whole spacecraft. 'I think of it as viewing a cross-section, a slice through the atmosphere,' said Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey's project scientist at JPL. Seeing where those layers of water-ice clouds and dust are in relation to each other-whether there's one layer or several stacked on top of each other-helps scientists improve models of Mars' atmosphere. The mission wanted a more expansive view of the atmosphere. That's because THEMIS is fixed in place on the orbiter it usually points straight down. It can also measure how much water ice or dust is in the atmosphere, but only in a narrow column directly below the spacecraft. The infrared camera's sensitivity to warmth enables it to map ice, rock, sand, and dust, along with temperature changes, on the planet's surface. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission, and Lockheed Martin Space, which built Odyssey and co-leads day-to-day operations, spent three months planning the THEMIS observations.

The reason why the view is so uncommon is because of the challenges involved in creating it. Laura Kerber, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, explains how and why the spacecraft captured a view of the Red Planet similar to the International Space Station’s view of Earth.

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