The Phoenix has Landed on Mars
Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 5:24 pmJust in:
http://blogs.discovery.com/news_space/
NASA’s Phoenix lands safely on Mars
Signals confirm touchdown after ‘seven minutes of terror’
MSNBC staff and news service reports
updated 14 minutes ago
PASADENA, California - NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander survived its fiery plunge through the Red Planet's atmosphere in Sunday and made a bull’s-eye touchdown near its north pole.
The robotic craft, designed to dig into the icy soil to determine if the permafrost could have supported primitive life, landed as planned at 7:38 p.m. ET Sunday under a sunny Martian sky. It took another 15 minutes for the radio signals confirming the safe landing to travel the 170 million miles (270 million kilometers) from Mars to Earth.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24811991
Launched last summer, Phoenix traveled 422 million miles (675 million kilometers) over nearly 10 months. Its arrival to the high northern latitudes was closely watched by a trio of Mars orbiters passing overhead.
The successful landing gave NASA a third operating robot on the surface. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring the equatorial plains since 2004.
“We told them they’re going to have company,” said the rovers’ chief scientist, Steve Squyres of Cornell University. “This is sort of a distant relative of theirs. So they’re pretty excited about it.”
The $420 million Phoenix mission is led by the University of Arizona and managed by JPL.
Phoenix is equipped with an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) robotic arm capable of digging trenches in the soil to expose ice that is believed to be buried inches to a foot (30 centimeters) deep.
Should it find ice, the lander will analyze dirt and ice samples for traces of organic compounds, the chemical building blocks of life. It will also study whether the ice melted at some point in Mars’ history when the planet was warmer than its current harsh, cold environment.
Scientists do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the Phoenix landing site because it’s too frigid. But they say if raw ingredients of life exist anywhere on the planet, they likely would be preserved in the ice.
http://blogs.discovery.com/news_space/
NASA’s Phoenix lands safely on Mars
Signals confirm touchdown after ‘seven minutes of terror’
MSNBC staff and news service reports
updated 14 minutes ago
PASADENA, California - NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander survived its fiery plunge through the Red Planet's atmosphere in Sunday and made a bull’s-eye touchdown near its north pole.
The robotic craft, designed to dig into the icy soil to determine if the permafrost could have supported primitive life, landed as planned at 7:38 p.m. ET Sunday under a sunny Martian sky. It took another 15 minutes for the radio signals confirming the safe landing to travel the 170 million miles (270 million kilometers) from Mars to Earth.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24811991
Launched last summer, Phoenix traveled 422 million miles (675 million kilometers) over nearly 10 months. Its arrival to the high northern latitudes was closely watched by a trio of Mars orbiters passing overhead.
The successful landing gave NASA a third operating robot on the surface. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring the equatorial plains since 2004.
“We told them they’re going to have company,” said the rovers’ chief scientist, Steve Squyres of Cornell University. “This is sort of a distant relative of theirs. So they’re pretty excited about it.”
The $420 million Phoenix mission is led by the University of Arizona and managed by JPL.
Phoenix is equipped with an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) robotic arm capable of digging trenches in the soil to expose ice that is believed to be buried inches to a foot (30 centimeters) deep.
Should it find ice, the lander will analyze dirt and ice samples for traces of organic compounds, the chemical building blocks of life. It will also study whether the ice melted at some point in Mars’ history when the planet was warmer than its current harsh, cold environment.
Scientists do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the Phoenix landing site because it’s too frigid. But they say if raw ingredients of life exist anywhere on the planet, they likely would be preserved in the ice.
