Scientific Instruments
Five scientific instruments fly onboard Mars Global Surveyor:
- MOC - the Mars Orbiter Camera, operated by Malin Space Science Systems
- MOLA - the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter
- TES - the Thermal Emission Spectrometer
- MAG/ER - a Magnetometer and electron reflectometer
- USO/RS Ultrastable Oscillator for Doppler measurements
- MR Mars Relay - Signal receiver
The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) science investigation used 3 instruments: a narrow angle camera that took (black-and-white) high resolution images (usually 1.5 to 12 m per pixel) and red and blue wide angle pictures for context (240 m per pixel) and daily global imaging (7.5 km per pixel). MOC returned more than 240,000 images spanning portions of 4.8 Martian years, from September 1997 and November 2006. A high resolution image from MOC is either 1.5 or 3.1 km wide. So any image from this camera is at most 3.1 km wide. Often, a picture will be smaller than this because it has been cut to just show a certain feature. These high resolution images may be 3 to 10 km long. When a high resolution image is taken, a context image is taken as well. The context image shows the image footprint of the high resolution picture. Context images are typically 115.2 km square with 240 m/pixel resolution.
The Mars Relay antenna supported the Mars Exploration Rovers for data relay in conjunction with Mars Orbiter Camera's 12 MB memory buffer. In total, more than 7.6 gigabits of data were transferred this way.
Read more about this topic: Mars Global Surveyor
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