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This just in from Mars ...
Topic Started: Feb 13 2009, 06:42 AM (44 Views)
Warren
Administrator
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This just in from Mars ...

The Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully landed in the North Polar region of Mars. The area where Phoenix landed is near the north polar permanent ice cap, where it is expected that water ice lies just a few inches below the surface. The lander will dig into the ice to collect and analyze samples, in an attempt to learn more about the history of water on Mars and maybe, just maybe, find evidence for life.

This was a tremendous success for the NASA/JPL team and its leader Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, who took a risky bet by pulling an older, mothballed NASA lander, and re-engineering it to fix flaws that had doomed its twin in 1999. That spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, flew to an unknown fate on Mars in 1999: all communications were lost with it just a few minutes before it was supposed to land, leading NASA to cancel further missions in that program.

The current mission has apparently rescued all of the funding and planning that went into that earlier mission through an intense effort to identify and fix the earlier engineering flaws, and to thoroughly test and verify the operation of the lander and its scientific cargo.

NASA has recently had some solid successes on Mars with the landing and operation of the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that have been wandering around since January of 2004 - far and away in excess of their design lifetimes. Part of the success of those landings was due to the landers being enveloped in large balloons, which absorbed the shock of landing much like airbags protect the occupants of a car in a crash. However, this Phoenix lander was too heavy to employ the proven balloon method of landing, and NASA engineers reverted to thruster rockets to slow the lander during the last few hundred feet of its descent and bring it in for a soft landing. This is the first successful use of such propulsion landing technology on Mars since the Viking landers, 32 years earlier.

A live broadcast from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed tense controllers awaiting signals from the Mars Orbiter, which was relaying data from the Phoenix lander during its descent (events that had actually happened on Mars 15 minutes earlier due to the time it takes for signals to reach the Earth.)

Cheering and congratulatory hugs erupted when a signal was finally received indicating that the spacecraft had landed successfully and communicated its status to the Mars Orbiter.

It will be another couple of hours before the next status update, as the Mars Orbiter must circle around the planet before it passes over the landing site again and can upload data from the Phoenix lander beneath it. During this time, the lander should have unfolded its solar panels and taken its first pictures.

To keep up to date with these exciting developments from Mars, check the NASA Phoenix Lander website: www.nasa.gov/phoenix
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