NASA was forced to scrub the launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on top of a Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral today \u2013 on a mission to collect data from the Red Planet. <\/p>\n
The launch was delayed from Wednesday due to problem with a gyro on the spaceship. A problem with the sensors that measure the amount of fuel being loaded into the rocket appeared just minutes before lift-off today. <\/font><\/p>\n MRO is expected to spend four years circling Mars, collecting information that will help NASA plan where to land two robotic explorers later this decade and possible future human exploration of the Red Planet. Mars is a later stage of the Vision for Space Exploration \u2013 which was re-started with the Return to Flight of the Shuttle fleet. <\/font> <\/p>\n \u201cWith the subsurface of Mars, we\u2019ve literally just scratched the surface and we\u2019re trying to probe, now, more than a couple of feet into it,\u201d said project scientist Richard Zurek of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<\/font><\/p>\n The orbiter will join three other spacecrafts, including a European orbiter, when it arrives at the planet in March 2006. Two NASA rovers launched in 2003, Spirit and Opportunity, also continue to roam the planet \u2013 way beyond their expected lifespans \u2013 providing information on Mars.<\/font><\/p>\n The Atlas V will be followed by yet another launch on Saturday \u2013 in the busy NASA calendar \u2013 via a Boeing Delta 4 rocket carrying GOES-N Sat (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite N) to an orbit of 22,300 miles.<\/font><\/p>\n NASA will try again tomorrow to launch MRO.<\/p>\n Live update thread with news and images: <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA was forced to scrub the launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on top of a Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral today \u2013 on a mission to collect data from the Red Planet. The launch was delayed from Wednesday due to problem with a gyro on the spaceship. A problem with the sensors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n <\/font><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/em>http:\/\/forum.nasaspaceflight.com\/forums\/thread-view.asp?tid=276&start=1<\/em><\/p>\n