A Mars Odyssey

“Mars is literally pulling on our spacecraft, and at the same time it is pulling on our emotions,” Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said early Sunday afternoon. “We are excited at how close we are right now to beginning our study of a site where Martian water ice will be within our reach, after all these years of preparations. Our science mission begins as the spacecraft settles into its new home on Mars.”

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NASA has reported a signal has been detected from the Phoenix, stating it is on the surface of Mars. A long-awaited mission, sighs of relief could be heard on a global basis as the gravity from Mars helped speed NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander toward its final goal and landing site. Moving from a speed of 6,300 mph per hour to 8,500 mph by 12:30 pm Pacific Time, it was reaching 12,000 mph before it was approaching the top of the Martian atmosphere.

Entirely on track for its entry at 4:30 pm, the data was just received due to the time involved for radio signals to travel from Mars to Earth. Due to the fact Phoenix was on course, the last two opportunities for its trajectory adjustments were cancelled. With only five of eleven Mars landing attempts successful, the landing of the Phoenix is now considered a 3-legged champion, for sure, with 45-minutes on Mars as we speak. The Phoenix mission is led by Smith, with project management at JPL. The development partnership is with Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions are from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; the Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

With the 2002 Mars Odyssey Orbiter showing quite a bit of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain of the cold red planet, the Phoenix was sent to target this region, using its robotic arm to dig through the top soil to the water ice below. The goal is to bring both soil and water ice to the Phoenix’s platform for more of a “sophisticated scientific analysis” than has previously been done. The Phoenix lander is the very first mission to return data from Mars’ polar regions, instrumental in achieving the four science goals of NASA’s long-term Mars Exploration Program.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. 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.