Phoenix Mars Lander Approaches Mars Landing
“The risks will certainly be there, but the rewards will absolutely pay off,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program. The Phoenix mission’s potential wealth of information about Martian soil, the history of weather of Mars, as well as the state of water in the planet’s current climate outweigh the risks of another failure, he added.
Preparing to take a three month tour of the plains on Mars, the Phoenix Mars Lander will be landing in about two weeks to explore Mars for any possible signs of present or past life related to its water finds. With a line of maneuvers to check its course, the May 10th maneuver was cancelled as the Phoenix was right on schedule with another due, with another one scheduled this coming Saturday.
Still, NASA’s Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are in correct positions in order to track the descent of Phoenix, prepared to relay all communication between the Phoenix and Earth during its seven minute landing on Mars, and thereafter it settles. Everyone involved is fully aware that anything could happen—instrument failure, power failures, obstacles in the way, lack of power through the solar rays, and so on—but everyone is also aware of the fact the Phoenix is offering a wealth of possible answers about many areas. This information can be about its soil, its weather history, or its state of water in the planet’s current climate.
Directly involved is Ray Arvidson, chairman of the Phoenix landing site working group. The new lander’s operations will be based out of the University of Arizona at Tucson, where the most critical steps will be highly monitored once it lands with the University prepared to meet the unknown whenever it happens. The problems that have occurred so far have been fixed, with additional problems found and identified, even though the engineers are prepared for unforeseen issues to develop.
Scheduled to land on May 25, 2008, at 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT), there will be none of the traditional airbags for its landing. Instead, the Phoenix will depend on a set of rocket thrusters firing in slow pulses for the craft to slow down. Similar to its MPL design, the Viking landers of NASA used this landing approach in the 1970s.
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under 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.
