NASA Picks Lockheed Martin to Build 2005 Mars Craft

Posted by tourdemars to Reconnaissance Orbiter at October 3, 2001 12:00 PM

NASA selected today the builder of a Mars orbiter equipped to snap super-close-up pictures of the red planet’s enigmatic surface. Lockheed Martin has been green-lighted to construct the spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), to be launched in August 2005. The craft is to return the highest resolution images of the Martian surface ever taken by Mars-circling orbiter. Objects as small as the size of beach balls will be resolved through the lens of the orbiter’s camera system, said Jim Graf, the MRO project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL will manage the mission that will operate for five-and-a-half years.