Mars probe warding off radiation sickness

A drawing of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft

By Richard Stenger
CNN

(CNN) -- NASA engineers have raised the temperature on a Mars-bound spacecraft to help it weather a bout of space radiation. The induced fever should take care of radiation damage affecting an instrument on the Mars 2001 Odyssey, the space agency said.

The $300 million orbiter, the first mission to Mars since two NASA spacecraft disappeared near the red planet in 1999, is designed to measure radiation levels and look for mineralogical signs of water on our planetary neighbor.

Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a radio command last week ordering Odyssey to heat up its gamma ray spectrometer detector. The action was designed to erase radiation damage that has occurred naturally during the interplanetary cruise.

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"The detector will then be in an optimal state to collect science data" when scientists activate its sensor later this month, JPL said in a mission status report.

Also last week, JPL mission technicians conducted an in-flight test to make sure Odyssey's eyesight was in good condition. They pointed its thermal emission imager at the star Menkent and snapped several pictures of it.

Since leaving Earth in April, the spacecraft has traveled more than 16.5 million miles (26.6 million kilometers). It should arrive in Mars orbit in October after a journey of 286 million miles (460 million kilometers).