On april 7th, if all goes well, America's space agency nasa will renew its assault on Mars. The craft it is launching— dubbed the 2001 Mars Odyssey—should go into orbit around the planet in October. It will then spend one Martian year (ie, about two terrestrial ones) examining the surface, using three instruments. One is a thermal-emission imaging system, designed to study minerals by examining the infra-red light that they emit. The second is a gamma-ray spectrometer, which will probe the soil in a search for, among other things, hydrogen (and, by association, water). The third is a radiation experiment designed to work out how dangerous the Martian environment might be for human exploration.
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