Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.;
ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
Those contract winners — The Boeing Co.; Lockheed Martin Space
Systems; Northrop Grumman
Aerospace Systems; Orbital
ATK; and Space
Systems / Loral — took four months to appraise the need for Mars telecommunications and global high - resolution imaging as well as assess possible added scientific instruments, optical communications and the use of solar - electric propulsion.