We are measuring the topography of Mars!!!

Here is a shot of some of our team members awaiting the first data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). Just before the first MOLA data from Mars were due to be downloaded to Earth on September 15, 1997, the Deep Space Tracking Network station lost lock (this sort of thing happens occasionally, most frequently, it seems, when we are very interested in the downlink...). This is the view from the MOLA operations room at the Goddard Space Flight Center while we waited for the link to be re-established. Front row: Instrument Manager Ron Follas, Prof. Maria Zuber (MIT), System Engineer Jay Smith, Laser Transmitter Lead Engineer Rob Afzal, Science Team Member Jim Garvin, and Peggy Jester. Back row: Jeff Schott (MIT), Greg Elman, and William LaMartin. (Photo Credit: MOLA Principal Investigator David E. Smith)

The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mission was successfully launched November 7, 1996. The mission is intended to recover most of the science objectives of the ill-fated Mars Observer Mission, which was lost three days before it was to enter Mars orbit in August, 1993. The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA-2) is included in the MGS instrument payload. The objective of the MOLA investigation is to globally map the topography of Mars at a resolution to permit global and regional scale scientific analyses as well as to aid in future targeting of surface landers.

Mars Global Surveyor successfully inserted into orbit around Mars on September 11, 1997. During the Fall of 1997, the MOLA instrument collected eighteen ~20 minute-long topographic profiles of the Mars northern hemisphere. All but one of these were collected during periapsis passes while the MGS spacecraft was in a 35-hour long elliptical orbit during an unanticipated hiatus from aerobraking. More MOLA data was collected in the Spring and Summer of 1998, during the MGS spacecraft's Science Phasing Orbit (SPO), which occurred between from late March until September (MOLA stopped collecting data at the end of July) The SPO orbit is near-polar and has a period of 11 hours, 40 minutes and a periapsis height of about 170 km. In January, 1999 the MGS spacecraft achieved its desired circular mapping orbit. After an orbit phase to calibrate the gravity field, the spacecraft commenced its mapping mission and observed Mars nearly continuously through January 31, 2001. MGS is now in its extended extended mission phase, which will last until April, 2002. On the basis of continued high science return, NASA approved an "extended-extended" (E2) mission for MGS which will keep observations coming through September 2004. The MOLA oscillator stopped functioning on June 30, 2001 and MOLA is currently collecting data in passive radiometry mode.

Prof. Maria Zuber is the Deputy Principal Investigator of the MOLA-2 Investigation on MGS. Other MIT people working on the MOLA and Mars Global Surveyor Radio Science investigations include Professor Emeritus Gordon Pettengill, Research Scientist Greg Neumann, graduate students Philip Tracadas and Oded Aharonson, and Research Assistant Jeff Schott.

Click here for a summary of the results of the MOLA investigation.

Click here to access a full list of peer-reviewed publications from the MOLA Science and Engineering Teams.

And click here to download the archived MOLA data and documentation.

We are also involved in the processing and analysis of gravity from the MGS Radio Science Team. We are using gravity data in combination with topography to study the internal structure of Mars.

Click here to download the archived MGS radio science data.

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address comments to:
Maria Zuber (zuber@tharsis.gsfc.nasa.gov)