Six months and 285 million miles later, the Mars Odyssey sent back its first image from 13,600 miles above the south pole of the Red Planet.
Sent with the hope of capturing new information about the chemical and mineralogical makeup of the oft-visited planet, the Odyssey began its orbit by snapping thermal infrared images of the Martian southern hemisphere at night. The south polar ice cap for Mars is made of carbon dioxide and has a temperature of minus 120 degrees Celsius and measures more than 900 kilometers (540 miles) in diameter.
It is currently late spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars and the ice cap will continue to warm and shrink throughout the summer season.
NASA administrators say the image was taken as part of the initial testing and calibration for the thermal imaging sensors, but the results suggest that this one is only a hint of what's to come.
