Science

NASA Phoenix lander readies itself for new life on Mars

by William Atkins

Sunday, 04 March 2007

The Phoenix Mars Mission, scheduled to launch in August 2007, will end up on the northern pole of Mars in May 2008. As with the mythical Egyptian bird of the same name, the Phoenix had to regenerate itself after confronting previous mission cancellations, cost overruns, and unexpected rough terrain at its landing site. Scientists are hopeful that Phoenix will discover the history of water-ice on Mars.

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Under the direction of NASA and its Mars Scout missions, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona (Tucson) is heading up a multi-group exploration project that includes universities from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland; the Canadian Space Agency; and companies in the aerospace industry.

The Mars Scout program by NASA consists of a series of low-cost missions to Mars that have been chosen from proposals of the scientific organizations. The Phoenix lander had an original cost of $325 million. It is being built at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems facility near Denver, Colorado.

The Phoenix lander may have also been named such because of how it came to be built. Like the mythical bird that is born repeatedly out of the ashes of its predecessor, the Phoenix lander was constructed from numerous components that had been built for earlier missions that never were completed. For instance, the lander itself is a modified Mars Surveyer 2001 lander partially built (and later stored) by Lockheed Martin, whose mission was cancelled in 2000, after the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander missions failed in 1999. (The first spacecraft was destroyed when incorrectly programmed by ground controllers during its descent into the Martian atmosphere, and the second craft failed to return communication signals after its descent to the surface of Mars.)

After its nine-month space flight, the three-legged Phoenix lander will not move once retrorockets set the lander down on the icy northern polar plains of Mars. It will instead 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. 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.

The Phoenix Mars Mission had cost overruns with its radar system and other engineering and testing requirements, which ran several millions of dollars over the original cost. (Current overrun figures reach between $31 million and $41 million, but final cost figures could reach as high as $417 million.)

Recently, Phoenix mission scientists found—through photographs taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)—that the primary landing site contained numerous large boulders making the site unsuitable for a safe landing. Mission planners are considering other potential landing sites using the MRO and Mars Odyssey orbiter spacecraft. Scientists have made March 2007 as their deadline to pick a final landing site for Phoenix.

A Boeing Delta 2 booster, manufactured by the United Launch Alliance, is scheduled to launch Phoenix on August 3, 2007, from its Cape Canaveral (Merritt Island, Florida) LC-17 launch pad for its journey to Mars.

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

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