{"id":216849,"date":"2025-06-29T18:09:02","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T23:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/rolling-for-science-mars-orbiter-learns-new-moves-after-nearly-20-years-in-space"},"modified":"2025-06-29T18:09:02","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T23:09:02","slug":"rolling-for-science-mars-orbiter-learns-new-moves-after-nearly-20-years-in-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/rolling-for-science-mars-orbiter-learns-new-moves-after-nearly-20-years-in-space","title":{"rendered":"Rolling for science: Mars orbiter learns new moves after nearly 20 years in space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/rolling-for-science-mars-orbiter-learns-new-moves-after-nearly-20-years-in-space2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze even more science out of the busy spacecraft as it circles the Red Planet. Engineers have essentially taught the probe to roll over so that it\u2019s nearly upside down. Doing so enables MRO to look deeper underground as it searches for liquid and frozen water, among other things.<\/p>\n<p>The new capability is <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/PSJ\/addbe1\" target=\"_blank\">detailed<\/a> in a paper recently published in <i>The Planetary Science Journal<\/i> documenting three \u201cvery large rolls,\u201d as the mission calls them, that were performed between 2023 and 2024.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot only can you teach an old spacecraft new tricks, you can open up entirely new regions of the subsurface to explore by doing so,\u201d said one of the paper\u2019s authors, Gareth Morgan of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze even more science out of the busy spacecraft as it circles the Red Planet. Engineers have essentially taught the probe to roll over so that it\u2019s nearly upside down. Doing so enables MRO to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,224,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-science","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}