NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander Works on Tight Monday Schedule
“We are looking for patterns of movement and phase change,” said Michael Hecht, lead scientist for Phoenix’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, which includes the conductivity probe. “The probe is working great. We see some changes in soil electrical properties, which may be related to water, but we’re still chewing on the data.”
NASA’s Phoenix Lander is working a Monday schedule that involves staying awake all night—not yet previously done—in order to monitor changes in the lower atmosphere and ground surface, while the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter studies the ground and atmosphere from above. Using its weather station, stereo camera, and conductivity probe in order to monitor these changes, the probe was inserted into the ground last Sunday over 24-hours of measurements that were coordinated with the red planet’s atmospheric observations. Attempting to achieve the goal for observing time-of-day changes, the lander’s fork-like thermal and conductivity probe will hopefully find out things like water altering from ice phases to vapor phases, entering the atmosphere from the soil.
The NASA Phoenix Lander team’s plans after the observation are to command the lander to conduct additional testing of the techniques for collecting an icy soil sample. Once the team becomes confident about the collection method, they plan to use the Phoenix’s robotic arm to deliver an icy sample to the lander’s oven. On Saturday prior to the observation, the TEGA instrument was able to open both doors for the oven to get the first icy sample. Images from the Surface Stereo Camera confirmed that the doors are wide open, giving confidence to the Phoenix team regarding the mission.
Previously, the Phoenix Mars Mission had released stereo images of the surface near the Phoenix, with the images in the new 3-D gallery combining views from the “left and right eyes” of the lander’s Surface Stereo Imager (SSI) so they will appear three-dimensional which require red and blue 3D glasses–red for the left eye and blue for the right eye. Images that were taken by the camera between June 2 and July 1, 2008 were chosen by Mark Lemmon, SSI lead scientist from the Texas A&M University, College Station.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 7:26 am and is filed under Public Relations, 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.
