Newest additions to Mars exploration family return their first images of the Red Planet

ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission and NASA's MAVEN mission are the newest members of the Mars exploration family (Credit: ISRO/NASA)

Thursday, September 25, 2014, 4:08 PM - It's been a busy time in the Mars 'household' this week, as two new family members arrived - MAVEN, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, and the Indian Space Research Organisation's Mars Orbiter Mission (or MOM). Only in orbit of the planet for a few days now, both spacecraft have now sent back their very first images to Earth!

MAVEN, which arrived in orbit of Mars on Sunday night, doesn't take pictures like the other spacecraft we've sent out to explore our solar system. For its mission - exploring Mars' upper atmosphere, to help scientists unravel what happened to the planet's environment since its days as a much warmer, wetter world - sending back high-resolution optical images wouldn't be much help. Instead it gathers data in the part of the light spectrum outside the ranges that we can see. When the data is sent back to Earth, it results in images like this:

Credit: NASA Goddard

According to NASA:

The image shows the planet from an altitude of 36,500 km in three ultraviolet wavelength bands. Blue shows the ultraviolet light from the sun scattered from atomic hydrogen gas in an extended cloud that goes to thousands of kilometers above the planet’s surface. Green shows a different wavelength of ultraviolet light that is primarily sunlight reflected off of atomic oxygen, showing the smaller oxygen cloud. Red shows ultraviolet sunlight reflected from the planet’s surface; the bright spot in the lower right is light reflected either from polar ice or clouds.

The oxygen gas is held close to the planet by Mars’ gravity, while lighter hydrogen gas is present to higher altitudes and extends past the edges of the image. These gases derive from the breakdown of water and carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere. Over the course of its one-Earth-year primary science mission, MAVEN observations like these will be used to determine the loss rate of hydrogen and oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.  These observations will allow us to determine the amount of water that has escaped from the planet over time.

The presence of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere doesn't imply that it's breathable, by the way. We breathe molecular oxygen (O₂), but what MAVEN is seeing is the signal from free atomic oxygen (O), which is a trace gas there.

Meanwhile, India's Mars Orbiter Mission tweeted out these image samples from its first day on the job, commenting on the view and developing its skills.

The view is nice up here. pic.twitter.com/VmAjNI76lm

— ISRO's Mars Orbiter (@MarsOrbiter) September 25, 2014

A shot of Martian atmosphere. I'm getting better at it. No pressure. pic.twitter.com/A27s34q5AD

— ISRO's Mars Orbiter (@MarsOrbiter) September 25, 2014

This is just the first week for these two Martian newcomers, but they're probably in a little bit of a rush for an upcoming date. We're just over three weeks away from the arrival of Comet Siding Spring at Mars. Both of the spacecraft will need to perform a 'dodging' maneuver, to slip behind Mars during the most dangerous part of the flyby, but they should be able to captures some spectacular images and data from the comet as it passes. Their contributions will add to the others to give us some of the best data yet on these icy bodies, and since this is very likely Siding Spring's first trip through the inner solar system, they could give us insights into what the environment of our solar system was like when it first formed, billions of years ago.