After NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) arrives at Mars in March 2006, it will spend six months aerobraking. This fuel-saving maneuver requires the spacecraft to dip briefly into the martian atmosphere on each orbit, and use the resulting drag to adjust the shape and size of the spacecraft's orbit.
To aerobrake safely, however, MRO project scientists will use data from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter.
TES was developed at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility; it measures the dust content and temperature of the atmosphere. These quantities tell scientists how dense the atmosphere is and how high it extends, vital information for flight controllers.
