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TOPIC: The Phoenix lander
Blobrana


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Phoenix Mars Lander
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 A U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft carried NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft Monday, May 7, from Colorado to Florida, where Phoenix will start a much longer trip in August.
After launch, Phoenix will land on a Martian arctic plain next spring. It will use a robotic digging arm and other instruments to determine whether the soil environment just beneath the surface could have been a favourable habitat for microbial life. Studies from orbit suggest that within arm's reach of the surface, the soil holds frozen water.

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Blobrana


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RE: The Phoenix lander
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Nasa scientists are hurrying to find an alternative landing site for a long-armed robot set to launch this summer on a mission to dig into Mars' icy north pole to search for signs of primitive life.

"This is the first mission to actually reach down and get a handful of icy soil and analyse it"  - Peter Smith, mission principal investigator of the University of Arizona.

The original landing spot was turned down after images beamed back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter unexpectedly showed scores of bus-sized boulders littered over old crater rims on flat plains.
The gigantic rocks pose a danger to the Phoenix Mars lander, which, unlike the rolling twin rovers, will be stationary, Smith said.
Scientists scouring images of the Martian arctic have narrowed safe landing options to three possible candidates. They have until March to choose.
The three sites are clustered around the north pole, which is believed to have a huge amount of ice just below the surface. A site called Green Valley is located within a shallow valley and looks the most secure, Smith said.
The Phoenix lander, scheduled to launch in August and reach the Red Planet in 2008, is the first mission of the unmanned Mars Scout programme, a low-cost effort to study the Red Planet. The project's cost is capped at $386-million, but difficulties in finding a landing site and other issues have led to an extra $31-million in costs.
The probe's robotic arm can drill trenches as deep as 90cm to search for ice beneath the surface. The spacecraft will test the chemistry of the soil and ice. Scientists hope it will yield clues to the geologic history of water and determine whether microbes existed in the ice.
The Phoenix mission rose from the ashes of a previous failed Mars mission. The lander was built to fly as part of the 2001 Mars Surveyor programme.
The programme was scrapped after the mysterious disappearance of the Mars Polar Lander in 1999. An investigative board determined the Polar Lander prematurely shut off its engine during a landing attempt near the planet's south pole, causing it to tumble about 39m to its destruction.

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Blobrana


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In 2007, The Planetary Society will send a specialized silica-glass DVD to Mars aboard Phoenix, NASA's newest Scout mission, led by Principal Investigator Peter Smith at the University of Arizona. The disk, which is attached to the deck of the Phoenix lander, will include "Visions of Mars," a collection of 19th and 20th century stories, essays, and art inspired by the Red Planet. The disk also includes special features, such as the famous 1938 radio broadcast of HG Wells' classic, "War of the Worlds."

People around the world can add their own names (or those of family and friends) to the archival disk that features the works of such visionaries as The Planetary Society's co-founder Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Percival Lowell, and many more. The Planetary Society is collecting up to several million names to send on the Mars-bound DVD. Visit The Planetary Society's website to fly a name to Mars.

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Blobrana


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Phoenix Mars Mission
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The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) will open the doors to everyone who wants to tour the Phoenix Mars Mission science operations centre from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 21.

The LPL's Phoenix Mission centre in Tucson will be the base of science operations for NASA's next mission to the Red Planet. The Phoenix Mars Lander will be launched in August 2007 for a May 2008 touchdown. After the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasasdena, California, flies the spacecraft to Mars and verifies that the landed spacecraft is healthy, NASA will turn mission control over to UA in Tucson. The UA is the first university ever to lead a mission to Mars. LPL senior scientist Peter H. Smith is principal investigator.
The Phoenix Mars Mission will be the first lander ever to dig beneath Martian polar surface in search of water ice, clues to climate change, and habitat that might support life.
The payload includes a nearly eight-foot long robotic arm for digging down through soil into ice, a robotic arm camera, a surface stereo camera, a descent camera, a meteorological station, a high-temperature furnace and mass spectrometer, a powerful atomic force microscope and a miniature wet chemistry laboratory.

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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
Date:
The Phoenix lander
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NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains. The Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present.



Thursday's announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major milestone followed a critical review of the project's planning progress and preliminary design, since its selection in 2003.
Phoenix is the first project in NASA's Mars Scout Program of competitively selected missions. Scouts are innovative and relatively low-cost complements to the core missions of the agency's Mars exploration program.

"The Phoenix Mission explores new territory in the northern plains of Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth. NASA's confirmation supports this project and may eventually lead to discoveries relating to life on our neighbouring planet." - Peter Smith, project's principal investigator.

Phoenix is a stationary lander.
It has a robotic arm to dig down to the Martian ice layer and deliver samples to sophisticated analytical instruments on the lander's deck. It is specifically designed to measure volatiles, such as water and organic molecules, in the northern polar region of Mars. In 2002, the Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of ice-rich soil very near the surface in the arctic regions.
Like its namesake, Phoenix rises from ashes, carrying the legacies of two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, administratively mothballed in 2000, is being resurrected for Phoenix. Many of the scientific instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for that mission or flew on the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander in 1999.

"The Phoenix team's quick response to the Odyssey discoveries and the cost-saving adaptation of earlier missions' technology are just the kind of flexibility the Mars Scout Program seeks to elicit," - Doug McCuistion, Mars Exploration Program Director.
"Phoenix revives pieces of past missions in order to take NASA's Mars exploration into an exciting future," - Andrew Dantzler, Solar System Division.

The cost of the Phoenix mission is $386 million, which includes the launch. The partnership developing the Phoenix mission includes the University of Arizona; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, US; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the Canadian Space Agency, which is providing weather-monitoring instruments.

"The confirmation review is an important step for all major NASA missions. This approval essentially confirms NASA's confidence that the spacecraft and science instruments will be successfully built and launched, and that once the lander is on Mars, the science objectives can be successfully achieved." - Barry Goldstein, project manager for Phoenix.

Much work lies ahead. Team members will assemble and test every subsystem on the spacecraft and science payload to show they comply with design requirements. Other tasks include selecting a landing site, which should be aided by data provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launching in August, and preparing to operate the spacecraft after launch.




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