Glitch hits Mars orbiter camera

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 8, 2007 at midnight

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NASA engineers and their partners at Boulder's Ball Aerospace are troubleshooting a "serious" problem with the most powerful camera on the $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Built in Jefferson County by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, the spacecraft arrived at Mars last March and entered its final mapping orbit in September.

Its science instruments include the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, built by Ball.

The camera contains 14 light-sensitive chips, known as charge-coupled devices or CCDs, that convert starlight into digital signals. Problems have surfaced with the electronics attached to seven of the 14 CCDs, said lead HiRISE scientist Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona.

Electronic noise in the system is degrading picture quality, though NASA said in a Wednesday news release that the current impact is small. The big concern is that the situation will worsen.

Warming the camera's electronics before taking HiRISE pictures reduces or eliminates the noise. That's how mission engineers are coping - for now.

"We have mitigation by warming things up, so the chances are we can keep returning useful data for years to come," said McEwen, who characterized the problem as "serious."

"In a worst-case scenario, things are going to get worse and worse until there's no longer anything we can do," McEwen said. "In the worst case, it would spread to all of them (the CCDs), and we couldn't take useful images anymore."

A Ball Aerospace & Technologies spokeswoman said company engineers are working with NASA to understand the problem and find the best way to minimize it.

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