Update on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander
“Our ‘follow the water’ strategy for exploring Mars has yielded a string of dramatic discoveries in recent years about the history of water on a planet where similarities with Earth were much greater in the past than they are today,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington. “Phoenix will complement our strategic exploration of Mars by being our first attempt to actually touch and analyze Martian water — water in the form of buried ice.”
Beginning on August 3, 2007 for a three-week period, the NASA Mars Lander will carry research tools so advanced, they have never been used on Mars. Their purpose is to look beneath a frigid arctic Martian landscape for past or present favorable conditions for signs of life—located in the northern plains of the red planet–instead of the usual hills or craters that have been previously studied. After a dangerous and risky descent, once the Phoenix has landed, it will investigate whether previously found frozen water near the surface of Mars will melt enough for microbes to survive. The tools that the lander is carrying will help make this decision in order to send data back to earth.
The water ice was found in 2002 by the NASA’s Mars Odyssey in the arctic plains and in larger areas of the planet, and was not very deep—within an arm’s reach of the surface, according to NASA’s report. The Phoenix was specifically designed for the examination of the history of the ice, measuring how liquid water has modified the soil’s chemistry and mineralogy, according to Peter Smith, the principal investigator of the Phoenix at the University of Tuscon-Arizona. Also, it can assess whether the Martian polar environment is habitable for the most primitive forms of life.
Advanced capabilities allow it to lift samples from the icy waters to two instruments on its deck, in addition to “monitoring polar weather and the interaction of the atmosphere with the surface.” Its dimensions are 18 feet wide and 5 feet long, with the working robotic arm being 7.7 feet long in order to dig into the icy layers beneath the surface. A camera and conductivity probe on the arm is used to examine the soil and ice. One of the arms is using a heating form to check for volatile substance—water and carbon-based chemicals are considered necessary for the building blocs for life forms, while the other analyzes the soil’s chemistry.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
