May 19 2005
From The Space Library
NASA's JPL released a series of images that Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) had captured on 20 and 21 April, which showed, for the first time, NASA's Mars Odyssey and ESA's Mars Express spacecraft orbiting Mars. MGS had orbited the planet since 1997, Mars Odyssey had arrived in 2001, and Mars Express had arrived in late 2003. MGS and Mars Odyssey followed similar near-polar orbits, sometimes passing within 9 miles (15 kilometers) of each other, but Odyssey orbited higher than MGS to prevent collision. MGS had captured two images of Odyssey 7.5 seconds apart~ the first from a distance of 56 miles (90 kilometers) and the second from 84 miles (135 kilometers). The following day, MGS had captured an image of Mars Express from a distance of 155 miles (249 kilometers). (Tariq Malik, “New Photos Are First of Spacecraft Orbiting Mars,” Space.com, 20 May 2005, http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050519_mgs_orbiters.html (accessed 16 September 2009).)
NASA and the Florida Space Research Institute (F SRI) announced the third Centennial Challenges competition: the Moon Regolith Oxygen (MoonROx) challenge. The MoonROx challenge would require teams to develop hardware, within mass and power limits, able to extract a minimum of 5 kilograms (0.005 tonnes or 0.006 tons) of breathable oxygen from simulated lunar soil~ a volcanic ash called JSC-1~ within a period of 8 hours. The first team to accomplish the oxygen-production goal before June 2008 would win US$250,000. Existing state-of-the-art technologies were incapable of extracting oxygen from simulated lunar soil. FSRI Executive Director Samuel T. Durrance remarked that oxygen-extraction technologies would be critical for robotic and human missions to the Moon. (NASA, “NASA Announces New Centennial Challenge,” news release 05-128, 19 May 2005, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/may/HQ_05128_Centennial_Challenge.html (accessed 14 September 2009); Jeremy McGovern, “Astro Bytes: Extracting Oxygen from 'Lunar' Soil,” Astronomy News, 24 May 2005.)
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