Dateline: 10/24/01

Almost 285 million miles from a troubled Earth, NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft fired its engine and slipped peacefully into orbit around Mars.

"I am proud and happy to report that Odyssey is in orbit and is healthy," NASA Odyssey project manager Matt Landano announced late Tuesday night.

Over the next few months, NASA controllers will slow Odyssey down through a process called "aerobraking" to reduce the craft's orbit to only 250 miles above the surface of Mars. Compared to just getting Odyssey to Mars, NASA considers the aerobraking maneuvers easy.

Once at its low working orbit, Odyssey will map Mars for 917 Earth days, after which it will take on its secondary roll of providing a communications link for Mars missions now scheduled by NASA for launch in 2003 and 2004.

After its almost eight-month flight, Odyssey will orbit Mars mapping the surface while searching for water and minerals, and checking radiation levels and other environmental data.

Odyssey cost $300 million, weighs 1.7 tons and is the first spacecraft to reach Mars since 1999 when the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in Mars' atmosphere due to miscalculations by NASA controllers and the Mars Polar Lander crashed after a software problem prematurely shut down its landing engines.

Odyssey joins the Mars Polar Surveyor (Image Gallery), which has been sending back high-resolution photos of Mars since 1997.

While the Polar Surveyor's cameras can photograph surface details as small as 3 meters, Odyssey's cameras are designed to identify the specific mineral composition of geological features as small as 100 meters across.

"Putting the Odyssey into orbit about Mars is an achievement that each and every American ought to take pride in," stated NASA's top administrator Daniel Golden. "It embodies the true American spirit that we can win after being knocked down a few times."