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 The MRO is well into it's primary science phase, after sending back many snapshots of past landing sites of the Landers and rovers. Mars is now getting closer, after a solar conjunction, a phase which the Sun is between earth and mars. This kept the orbiter from sending back data for that stretch of time. All seems well, with almost all instruments being un-stowed early after orbit insertion. However there now appears to be some issues with two instruments, one is the very powerful HiRIsE camera, which sends back from time to time some " bad-pixels " from as many as five CCD detectors. Another instrument issue is the Mars Climate Sounder, an issue of position with the Field of View. problems for this instrument reoccurred enough to re-stow  this instrument for the time being.

SHARAD ( Shallow Subsurface Radar ) Is one of many instruments onboard the MRO, Made by the Italian Space Agency. When the main science phase begins early this September, when the orbiter is at its lowest orbit about 200 miles above the surface, SHARAD will emit waves from the Two long Antennas ( Seen Above ) At around 15-30 MHz then Listen for Echoes, which as milliseconds go by, the echoes will reveal Shallowness and Thick areas Beneath the Martian Surface. It's Data will be in the form of a "along-track" scale, meaning that its depth-data will be parallel to the orbiters orbiting track. 

To Elaborate a little more on SHARAD, It's nothing new, the same agency was also responsible for a very-much similar device onboard the Mars Express Orbiter, called MARSIS, It Began to take sensing during the Summer of '05, mostly of the ionosphere to see how this would affect underground observations.

 

MARSIS from orbit to 1500 km.

artist rendition of the MARSIS monopoles

The above images are from the Mars Express orbiter.


 

Spectrometers will measure how much of the Suns light is reflected and absorbed at  ranges from both visible and infrared. patterns in the absorption and reflection give a clue as to what kinds of materials are present. the human eye can see the primary colors as.. Blue- 430 nanometers, Green- 530 nanometers and Red- 630 nanometers, in order to "see" the invisible, the range of infrared, the intensities of these bands will be represented with that of the visible, the very primary colors in which the human sees which makes this a false-color image. ie ( Blue(430) now represents the lightness of 1,150 nanometers (1.15 microns ), Green(530) now is intensities of 1,800 nanometers (1.8 microns) and Red(630) now is intensities of 2,250 nanometers (2.25 microns) ). Below is a triplet, one is true-color, the other two are false-color representations, all of the same region of mars.

Experimental Ka- Band Satellite Communication- high frequency 26.5-40 GHz, rather than the standard, X-band, a lower frequency 8-12GHz and a wider beam width , slower wave speed. Ka band has some up sides as well as some down sides. The Ka band is faster, in that data will reach Earth in much less time as compared to X band and send back a little more data than X band. The downside of Ka band is that moisture in the atmosphere, some smaller than light rain on Earth can weaken the signal greatly as opposed to X band because of the fact that microwaves are attracted to moisture and discharge from electrical energy into heat along the beams travel, some bands more than others in the microwave band. So both X and Ka band transmitters have been incorporated into the MRO's High Gain Antenna for use during appropriate times.

3db beam width for different bands of microwave satellite bands.

X- 3 degrees

Ka- less than a degree.

 

HiRISE- 28 Centimeters per pixel ! will be the detail of the finest-detail of the images that this orbiter will send back.

 

Since it's orbit-insertion on March 10, The Orbiter has fired it's thrusters several times to adjust a highly - elliptical orbit to a mere perfect - circular orbit around September. Instead of using thrusters to do all the work, the orbiter will encounter the Martian atmosphere, in doing so, the friction of the atmosphere, which has varying thickness depending on direction will heat up some parts of the orbiter as well as slowing the orbiter so that the orbit will be "re-shaped", which is a process called Aerobreaking

In the image above, lower altitude areas appear brighter and reflect more than higher altitude areas.

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimiter (MOLA)