This morning flight controllers turned the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and pointed the thermal emission imaging system at Earth and the Moon to calibrate the instrument. All calibration objectives were met.
Engineers are in the process of redesigning the spacecraft's cruise attitude after they noted temperature readings that were higher than expected on a high-gain antenna gimbal earlier this week. The cruise attitude points the high-gain antenna toward Earth as the spacecraft travels toward Mars.
Next week, the team will turn on the Martian radiation environment experiment and prepare to transition to the new cruise attitude.
Odyssey is currently 3,491,598 kilometers (2,169,574 miles) from Earth and traveling at a speed of 3.3 kilometers per second (7,408 miles per hour) relative to Earth.
The Mars Odyssey mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. The Odyssey spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo.