The Phoenix Mars Mission is scheduled to launch on August 3, 2007, with its earliest launch being at 5:35 a.m. EDT.

A Boeing Delta 2 (7925) booster, manufactured by the United Launch Alliance, will launch Phoenix from its Cape Canaveral (Merritt Island, Florida) LC-17 launch pad for its journey to Mars.

Under the direction of NASA, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona (Tucson) is heading up the Phoenix project that includes universities from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland; the Canadian Space Agency; and companies in the aerospace industry. For the past year, technicians at Denver have been assembling and testing Phoenix.

While at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians will prepare Phoenix for launch in the Payload Processing Facility. A spin-balance test will occur on May 10 and 11. The installation of Phoenix’s heat shield will occur on May 15, with a subsequent heat shield test to verify its proper fit. During the third week of May, a landing radar integration test and a launch system verification test will be performed. The last week of May will consist of an entry, descent, and landing system verification test and a guidance, navigation, and control test.

The Phoenix payload will be placed on top of the Delta rocket in the third week of July. An integrated test of the Delta 2 and Phoenix will be performed at that time.

After its nine-month space flight from the Earth to Mars, the Phoenix lander will set down in May 2008 on the icy northern polar plains of Mars. Various orbiting satellites have already found widespread ice at this northern polar and at the opposite southern polar region. The Phoenix will, hopefully, be able to analyze soil that contains this ice.

The Phoenix will then use its robotic arm, scoop, and grinder to scratch, dig, and crush icy soil samples (several feet out into the soil) from both on and beneath the surface.
the spacecraft is to land just as the winter ice begins to recede around the polar cap.

If successful, the Phoenix lander will analyze Martian water for the first time by humankind. Instruments onboard the spacecraft will analyze the soil samples. The mission’s primary purpose is to discover water’s geologic history on the planet and to search for possible Martian environments that could produce microbial life.

Samples collected by the NASA probe will be dissolved in water so that its onboard laboratory can look for salt, which was often deposited in soils on Earth during its watery past. Small heating devices are located onboard the Phoenix that can dissolve minerals in the samples for chemical analysis.

The Web site for the Phoenix Mars Mission is: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/.

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