Friendly Allies Offer NASA’s Phoenix lander Safety
Descending to Mars is probably one of the most dangerous parts of a mission in the 13 minutes of descent, with the Phoenix lander descending to Mars and having the assistance of the European Mars Express (ESA) to monitor its safety and descent. Sorry. More technically spoken, “NASA has requested that the ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft will be following Phoenix’s Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) phase.”
While the Phoenix is descending it will send back a continuous amount of information and data to NASA’s two satellites currently orbiting Mars. The ESA’s Mars Express has been in orbit around Mars since December of 2000, and also within the vicinity of the NASA Phoenix lander descent. The elliptical orbit of the Mars Express allows it to observe the Phoenix spacecraft to have a continuous view and be able to communicate with it for longer periods of time than the other satellites.
A wonderful example of cooperation between international countries, along with interplanetary networking, the 2008 spring descent of the Phoenix lander will investigate Martian environment, in search for conditions of past or present life beneath the frigid, arctic landscape. Itself, the Mars Express has displayed international interplanetary networking in previous times. On August 10, 2004, the ESA Mars Express relayed pictures back to Earth from NASA’s Mars rovers for the first time ever. This demonstration between the two international countries actually begin to pave the way for future Mars missions (such as the Phoenix lander mission) which were planned out for continuing efforts to co-operate in space exploration.
On another demonstration of joint efforts on August 4, 2004, the Mars Express flew over Opportunity, one of NASA’s Mars exploration rovers. It successfully gathered data previously collected from the rover. This included 15 science images from nine of the cameras on the rover Opportunity were downloaded to ESA’s European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt in Germany, then immediately relayed to the Mars Exploration Rovers team which was based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in the United States.
The ESA must have been impressed with the Mars rovers as on July of 2007, they asked Thales Alenia Space, which is the lead industrial partner on the ExoMars project, to give them an estimate for building them a Mars Rover for their space agency. ESA also would like to know how much it would cost to build them a 200kg rover that is capable of maneuvering with dexterity over the surface of Mars. It may be carrying a 16kg-instrument package plus possibly a 30kg-science package of instruments to study for geology and environment, in the search for life on Mars.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. 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.
