Mars climate sounder

The Mars climate sounder is a major instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Mars Climate Sounder will look both down and horizontally through the atmosphere in order to quantify the global atmosphere’s vertical variations of water vapor, dust and temperature. This instrument, supplied by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, utilizes recent technological advances to achieve the measurement objectives of a heavier, less compact instrument originally developed at JPL for the 1992 Mars Observer and 1998 Mars Climate Orbiter missions.