What is Mars Odyssey?

About Mars Odyssey:

• It was an early mission in NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
• It was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 7, 2001.
• The Odyssey spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since 2001.
• Odyssey's original goals were to search for signs of water, make detailed maps of the planet’s surface materials and determine radiation levels for humans.
• The spacecraft holds the record for the longest continually active mission in orbit around a planet other than Earth. Its mission is scheduled to last until 2025.
• It created the first global map of chemical elements and minerals that make up the Martian surface.
• Odyssey continues to study Mars’s surface to see how the planet changes over time. 
• The spacecraft also serves as a communications relay to Earth for spacecraft on the surface that lack high-powered antennas and cannot beam information to Earth very quickly. 

Key Facts about Olympus Mons:

• It is a shield volcanolocated in Mars’ western hemisphere.
• It is the highest point on Mars and the largest known volcano in the solar system.
  • It is 16 miles (24 kilometers) high, which makes it about three times higher than Mt. Everest.
  • It is also very wide (340 miles or 550 kilometers) and covers an area larger than the entire chain of Hawaiian Islands.
  • In contrast, the largest volcano on Earth, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, is 120 kilometers across and 9 kilometers high.
• It is some 3.5 billion years old, which means the volcano formed early on in Mars’ history.
• It is a very flat mountainwhich slopes by only 2 to 5 degrees.
• Its summit is marked by a caldera, a large depression formed by volcanic activity, spanning 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide.
  • The summit caldera consists of several overlapping pits. These pits were created by different eruptive phases.
  • In contrast, many Earth-based volcanoes typically feature a single, less complex caldera.