NASA announced it has altered the orbit of the Odyssey spacecraft, which has spent the most time observing Mars for the space agency.

According to a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) news release, mission managers made the course change Tuesday. The maneuver will allow the Odyssey to better observe early fogs, clouds and surface frost develops in different seasons on the Red Planet.

"We're teaching an old spacecraft new tricks," JPL's Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut said in the release. "Odyssey will be in position to see Mars in a different light than ever before."

Thanks to the new orbit, the craft will be able to observe and measure ground temperatures after sunrise and after sunset in different areas all over Mars. The new data would allow scientists to analyze various processes that are tied to temperature, like carbon-dioxide geysers near Mars' poles.

"This veteran spacecraft performed exactly as planned," said Odyssey Project Manager David Lehman of JPL.

Odyssey is one of NASA's Mars orbiters that have never orbited the Red Planet with a view of the ground in broad daylight. Odyssey's mission turns 12 years old this month and was launched in 2001.

Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) principal investigator Philip Christensen proposed changing the craft's orbit shift to past six o'clock from four o'clock. The shift would give the orbiter a better view of the ground and then NASA agreed with the project managers to plan to the maneuver.

"We don't know exactly what we're going to find when we get to an orbit where we see the morning just after sunrise," Christensen, of Arizona State University, said in the release. "We can look for seasonal differences. Are fogs more common in winter or spring? We will look systematically. We will observe clouds in visible light and check the temperature of the ground in infrared."