* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: The Phoenix lander

Blobrana · L

Scientists with the UA-led Phoenix Mars Mission hope experiments conducted this week will provide insight into what causes deep cracks on the red planet's arctic surface.
Over the holiday weekend, Phoenix's robotic arm delivered a tiny soil sample from the bottom of a trough on Mars' surface to an onboard chemistry experiment.
Scientists have speculated that the polygonal troughs, which in photographs resemble scars on the planet's surface, possibly could be formed by the melting and refreezing of water in the polar region.

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Blobrana · L

From the location of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, above the Martian arctic circle, the sun does not set during the peak of the Martian summer.
This period of maximum solar energy is past on Sol 86, the 86th Martian day after the Phoenix landing, the sun fully set behind a slight rise to the north for about half an hour.
The lander's Surface Stereo Imager took a red-filter image that shows the sun rising on the morning of sol 90 (Aug. 25), the last day of the Phoenix nominal mission.
The image was taken at 51 minutes past midnight local solar time during the slow sunrise that followed a 75 minute "night."

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Blobrana · L

The next sample of Martian soil being grabbed for analysis is coming from a trench about three times deeper than any other trench NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has dug.
On Tuesday, Aug. 26, the spacecraft will finish the 90 Martian days (or "sols") originally planned as its primary mission and will continue into a mission extension through September, as announced by NASA in July. Phoenix landed on May 25...

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Blobrana · L

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has scooped up a soil sample from an intermediate depth between the ground surface and a subsurface icy layer. The sample was delivered to a laboratory oven on the spacecraft.
The robotic arm on Phoenix collected the sample, dubbed "Burning Coals," from a trench named "Burn Alive 3." The sample consisted of about one-fourth to one-half teaspoon of loose soil scooped from depth about 3 centimetres below the surface of the ground and about 1 centimetre above a hard, icy underground layer.

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Blobrana · L

Image taken by the Phoenix lander on Sol 80

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Credit NASA

Blobrana · L

The Surface Stereo Imager, or SSI, on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has seen water frost on the ground around the spacecraft's landing site.
Water frost appears in an image the SSI took on Aug. 14, 2008, at 6 a.m. local Mars time on Sol 79, the 79th Martian day after landing. The frost begins to disappear shortly after 6 a.m. as the sun rises on the landing site.

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Blobrana · L

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has taken the first-ever image of a single particle of Mars' ubiquitous dust, using its atomic force microscope. The particle -- shown at higher magnification than anything ever seen from another world -- is a rounded particle about one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across. It is a speck of the dust that cloaks Mars. Such dust particles colour the Martian sky pink, feed storms that regularly envelop the planet and produce Mars' distinctive red soil.

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Blobrana · L

Phoenix Mars mission scientists spoke today on research in progress concerning an ongoing investigation of perchlorate salts detected in soil analysed by the wet chemistry laboratory aboard NASA's Phoenix Lander.

"Finding perchlorates is neither good nor bad for life, but it does make us reassess how we think about life on Mars" - Michael Hecht of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyser (MECA), the instrument that includes the wet chemistry laboratory.

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Blobrana · L

For centuries mankind has looked to the Red Planet more than 35 million miles away and wondered 'Is there life on Mars?'
But if there is, it seems, the Martians might now be reaching for their gas masks.
Because in a startling revelation yesterday, Nasa announced that its Phoenix spacecraft may have detected perchlorate, a potentially toxic substance, in soil samples taken from Mars.

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