A Mars Odyssey

“We wanted to prove that in the data we’ve collected from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey and Mars Express and Mars Global Surveyor, we have sites that we consider safe and that we can pursue with diligence,” says Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith. “And I think we accomplished the goal very nicely. We’ve got three sites. One is clearly the safest, but since all the data hasn’t been analyzed or even received yet, we’re a little hesitant to say that’s the site. So we are going to continue to pursue all three sites.” (Original preparation for Phoenix Mars lander setting)

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On Thursday, April 10, 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander changed its course to zero when it prepared for its red planet landing site that has been decided on of the three original ones. In fact, over five million rocks have been mapped by Martian orbiting spacecraft to prepare for the landing of the Phoenix. “This is our first trajectory maneuver targeting a specific location in the northern polar region of Mars,” said Brian Portock, chief of NASA’s Phoenix navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement.

Firing its thrusters yesterday for 35 seconds, it was in the initial preparation steps of getting ready for its May 25th landing near the North Pole on Mars, dubbed as the “Green Valley.” This area has the largest concentration of ice on Mars – outside of the polar caps – in order to search for some sort of habitable zone in the arctic permafrost, according to Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

The Green Valley is a flat valley which is also very broad, allowing the NASA mission planners to land the Phoenix “somewhere” within a 62-mile by 12-mile ellipse. The site was chosen because it offers a smooth terrain with only a few scattered rocks, as compared to exceptionally large boulders in the other sites. Ray Arvidson, who is the chair of the Phoenix landing site working group and a veteran Mars scientist, is quoted in Space.com, as this chosen area is the polygonal plains which range from a few meters to 10 centimeters in height, expected to contain dirty water ice beneath their surface.

Arvidson is also a co-investigator for Phoenix’s robotic arm at Washington University in St. Louise, MO. “We have never before had so much information about a Mars site prior to landing,” Arvidson said in a statement regarding the preparation for the landing on May 25th for studies on Mars water ice and soil to see if the chosen landing site may once have been habitable for microbial life. The Phoenix spacecraft was also designed for use as a Martian arctic weather and atmosphere-monitoring station.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 2:20 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, 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.