!!! Press Release !!!

After 10 months and 435 million miles in deep space, the Mars Global Surveyor approached the Red Planet on Sept. 9, 1997. The Mars Global Surveyor is powered by advanced III-V Solar Panels fabricated in the US, using most modern MOCVD production equipment supplied by AIXTRON AG, Germany. Now, Global Surveyor successfully performed a maneuver that had doomed an earlier mission.

To the relief of scientists and engineers on Earth, Global Surveyor opened valves to allow high-pressure rocket propellant to flow into the engine’s fuel tanks. The highly corrosive fuel is held in a special storage tank until needed. The rocket was fired on Sept. 11, slowing the spacecraft enough so it can be captured by Mars’ gravity. This maneuver was the same as one that failed in 1993, causing the Mars Observer probe to be lost. Observer either blew up or spun out control when valves were opened.

Engineers redesigned the Global Surveyor’s systems. But the maneuver still was "a nail-biter", said Glenn Cunningham, project manager for both Global Surveyor and Observer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Arden Albee, project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said, "A number of us have been waiting for this week for almost 20 years". Noting his white beard, he added: "I was clean-shaven then".

The stakes are high for the Global Surveyor, the first U.S. spacecraft in 20 years built to orbit Mars. Launched Nov. 7, 1996 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, it is designed to map Mars in great detail for two years and return information on surface features, atmosphere and climate. It could help answer the question of whether life ever existed on Mars by looking for places where water once flowed.

But first the $250 million Global Surveyor must get into place around Mars. To do that, controllers ordered the spacecraft to fire its engine for 22 minutes starting at 9:31 p.m. ET Sept. 11, so it can slow enough to be captured by Martian gravity. It will start out in a 45-hour egg-shaped orbit. Then, over the next four months, controllers will gradually shrink the size of that orbit with a series of maneuvers called aerobraking. Global Surveyor’s solar panels will dip into Mars’ atmosphere, using the resulting drag to slow down.

By March 1998, when its mapping mission begins, Global Surveyor should be in a tight two-hour circular orbit about 234 miles above the planet’s surface. From there, it should be able to locate the site where Mars Pathfinder landed July 4. There again, AIXTRON MOCVD technology was critical in powering up the Mars Pathfinder with GaAs based Solar Cells. 

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© AIXTRON September 1997

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