Nozomi Succeeds in Earth Swingby ISAS

MARSDAILY

Streaming from the outer space surrounding the solar system, the interstellar gas including helium and hydrogen passes through the solar system. The helium forms a dense area on the other side of the sun, from the earth strongly attracted by the solar gravitational force. This dense area is called the helium cone after its shape. The extreme ultra-violet telescope on-board the Mars orbiter, NOZOMI observes the spread of the helium cone by measuring the scattered solar rays by the helium particles. In the figure, the horizontal axis is the longitude and the vertical axis is the latitude of the universe. Color code represents the intensity of the measured solar rays with red latitude of indicating the most dense helium ion region, which is the helium cone. (Helium gas drifting in cosmic space observed by NOZOMI)

Tokyo - Apr 07, 2003
The Japanese Mars exploration mission Nozomi launched on July 4, 1998, is now cruising in interplanetary orbit, and on target for a final flyby of Earth ahead of insertion into Mars orbit at the end of 2003.

On December 21, 2002, the explorer came close to Earth and successfully implemented the earth swingby. The time of its nearest approach to Earth was at about 4:37 p.m. with a distance of approx. 30,000 km. This marked Nozomi's return home after a long absence.

At it's furthest point, it was 360 million km away from Earth. Unfortunately, when Nozomi was approaching Earth, we were unable to see it from Japan. By this swingby, the explorer deviated a little from the ecliptic plane and shifted to the trajectory passing the north of Earth.

After encountering a large solar flare involving coronal mass ejections on April 21, 2002, that damaged equipment and caused its power system to malfunction, Nozomi has been unable to send telemetry. Scientific observation during the cruising phase was therefore cancelled. But the ranging function for orbit determination and command receiving are normal.

In addition, by adopting an ingenious technique that makes use the Nozomi's onboard autonomous capability and substituting ON/OFF beacon radio waves for telemetry, we are able to implement attitude and orbital control. At present we are analyzing in detail the cause of the failure and searching for countermeasures for recovery.

Nozomi will execute the earth swingby again on June 19, 2003, and enter into cruising orbit inside the ecliptic plane. At the end of this year, the explorer will be ready to enter into the Mars orbit.

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MARSDAILY

Spirit Heading To 'Home Plate'

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 09, 2006
Last week Spirit completed robotic-arm work on "El Dorado." The rover used all three of its spectrometers plus the microscopic imager for readings over the New Year's weekend.

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