MAVEN, which reached Mars on September 21, 2014, studies the upper atmosphere.
It flies on an elongated orbit, sometimes farther from Mars than NASA’s other orbiters and sometimes closer to Mars, so it crosses altitudes occupied by those orbiters.
For safety, NASA also monitors positions of ESA’s and India’s orbiters which both fly along elongated orbits.
Traffic management at Mars is much less complex than in the Earth orbit, where more than 1,000 active orbiters plus additional pieces of inactive hardware add to hazards.
As Mars exploration intensifies, precautions are increasing.
The new process was established to manage this growth as new members are added to the Mars orbital community in years to come.
“It is a monitoring function to anticipate when traffic will get heavy,” said Joseph Guinn, manager of JPL’s mission design and navigation section.
When two spacecrafts are predicted to come too close to one another, “we give people a heads-up in advance so the project teams can start coordinating about whether any manoeuvres are needed,” he informed.
The new formal collision-avoidance process for Mars is part of NASA’s Multi-Mission Automated Deep-Space Conjunction Assessment Process.
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