http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

Soon this probe will land on mars. It is going to land on water ice and then bore into it an arms length, looking for life. Check out the above official site.

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What if your blessings come through raindrops
What if your healing comes through tears...

Awesome, that could be an incredibly interesting mission.

Let all hope for a safe landing.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

Here's an update from SPACE.com
Phoenix Lander Takes Aim at Martian Arctic
posted: 01 May 2008 07:00 am ET
By Tariq Malik, Senior Editor

NASA's Mars-bound Phoenix spacecraft is gearing up for a landmark landing near the martian north pole this month to find out whether the region could have once supported microbial life.

Phoenix is on course for a planned May 25 touchdown in the martian arctic that, if successful, will mark the first powered landing on Mars since NASA's hefty Viking 2 lander set down in 1976. But first, the probe is expected to fire its thrusters several times in the next few weeks to fine-tune its flight path.

"It's scary how smooth it's been," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "The vehicle has just been behaving beautifully."

The Phoenix lander tweaked its course in early April and is scheduled to fire its thrusters in three successive Saturday maneuvers beginning May 10. The spacecraft has flown so accurately that one of the maneuvers may not be necessary, Goldstein said.

Launched in August 2007, Phoenix is a stationary lander equipped with a trench-digging robotic arm to bite into the martian surface and scoop up samples of nearby soil and water ice. The probe's top-mounted suite of ovens and wet chemistry instruments are designed to help determine whether its arctic plain landing site - a region similar in latitude to central Greenland or northern Alaska on Earth - could have once proven habitable for primitive life.

"We're looking for all the ingredients for life," Phoenix deputy principle investigator Deborah Bass of JPL told SPACE.com.

Phoenix also includes a martian atmosphere-monitoring station designed to provide daily weather updates during the probe's planned three-month mission. Engineers at JPL will oversee the spacecraft's initial Mars descent and landing before transferring operations to a control center at the University of Arizona, Tucson, for the remainder of the $420 million mission.

"This is an area of Mars that I have spent my career studying and I cannot wait to see those first images," Bass said. "To see that ice, what that frozen tundra is going to look like...whatever we see will be amazing because no one's seen it before."

Unlike the most recent probes to land on Mars - NASA's twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the lost British lander Beagle 2 - Phoenix will not use airbags to cushion its arrival on the martian surface. Instead, it carries a set of rocket thrusters control its final descent, though its approach will mark the first powered landing attempt since NASA's Mars Polar Lander crashed near the planet's south pole in December 1999.

"I have always trumpeted the fact that we should be very guarded and very humble in our approach with what we're trying to do, because it is so difficult," Goldstein said, adding that engineers have identified and addressed as many of the risks as possible.

Phoenix's science team, led by principle investigator Peter Smith at the University of Arizona, Tucson, has been eagerly preparing for the lander's Mars arrival with a series of training simulations for landing day and mission operations. The most recent simulation, a dress rehearsal for Phoenix's entry and descent through the martian atmosphere, was scheduled for Tuesday.

"At this point, we feel we're in good shape and we want to do it. We're ready," Bass said. "This team is itching to get its hands on this stuff...it's show time."

Phoenix has safely landed on Mars. Details to follow.

One of the mission leaders (I didn't catch his name) just told ABC news that the landing could "...not have gone better in [his] dreams." He continued to say that even in the training simulations that their best case scenario did not go as smoothly as the actual landing.

Now Pheonix must deploy its solar cell arrays and begin to charge its main batteries for an anticipated first photo transmission from Mars north pole in about an hour and a half.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--PKD

Post landing status poll is expected at 8:50 PM EDT. Possible first image from the lander is expected after 9:30 PM EDT.

The lander is in a near-perfect position on the surface with about .5 degree (half a degree) of tilt. Solar panels are expected to deploy with no problems. A link with Mars Odyssey (which is orbiting overhead) will be established to relay status to and commands from JPL

The EDL (Entry, Decent, Landing) phase post report, all nominal with the exception of the drag chute being deployed seven seconds later than expected.

A well-deserved "Thanks!" to the JPL team and their partners at Lockheed Martin.

PASADENA, Calif. - A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and landed in the Red Planet’s northern polar region on Sunday to begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.

Cheers swept through Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nail-biting descent.

"Phoenix has landed! Phoenix has landed! Welcome to the northern plains of Mars," deputy systems engineer Richard Kornfeld announced.

NASA project manager Barry Goldstein said about a minute's worth of data was received from the spacecraft before a planned two-hour blackout — and the data indicated that Phoenix was sitting almost exactly level on its landing site.

“In my dreams it couldn’t have gone as perfectly as it went,” Goldstein said. “It went right down the middle.”

Among Phoenix’s first tasks were to check its power supply and the health of its science instruments, and unfurl its solar panels after the dust settled. Then the first pictures were to be taken, for transmission to Earth after the end of the blackout.

Seven minutes of terror
Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph (19,200 kilometers per hour) after a 10-month, 422 million-mile (675 million-kilometer) voyage through space. It performed a choreographed dance that included unfurling its parachute, shedding its heat shield and backshell, and firing thrusters to slow to a 5 mph (8 kph) touchdown.

The automated descent was dubbed "the seven minutes of terror" for good reason. More than half of all nations’ attempts to land on Mars have ended in failures.

Peter Smith, the mission's lead investigator from the University of Arizona at Tucson, said the room was thick with tension during those seven minutes. "I couldn't let go of the chair," he said. "I had a grip on it."

Sunday's touchdown was the first successful soft landing on Mars since the twin Viking landers touched down in 1976. NASA’s twin rovers, which successfully landed on Mars four years ago, used a combination of parachutes and cushioned air bags to bounce to the surface.

Phoenix’s landing is a relief for NASA, since Mars has a reputation for swallowing spacecraft. More than half of all nations’ attempts to land on Mars have failed.

Taking in the arctic sights
Phoenix’s target landing site was a 30-mile-wide (50-kilometer-wide) shallow valley in the high northern latitudes, similar in location to Earth’s Greenland or northern Alaska. The site was chosen because images from space spied evidence of a reservoir of frozen water close to the surface.

Like a tourist in a foreign country, the lander initially will take in the sights during its first week on the Red Planet. It will talk with ground controllers through three Mars orbiters, which will relay data and images.

Phoenix is equipped with an 8-foot-long (2.4-meter-long) arm capable of digging trenches in the soil to get to ice that is believed to be buried inches to a foot deep. Then it will analyze the dirt and ice samples for traces of organic compounds, the chemical building blocks of life.

The lander also will study whether the ice ever melted at some point in Mars’ history when the planet had an environment warmer than the current harsh, cold one it currently has.

Scientists do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the Phoenix landing site because it’s too frigid. But they say that if raw ingredients of life exist anywhere on the planet, they likely would be preserved in the ice.

Phoenix, however, cannot detect signs of alien life that may exist now or once existed.

The only other time NASA searched for chemical signs of life was during the Viking missions. Neither lander found conclusive evidence of life.

Avoided Polar Lander's doom
Phoenix avoided the doom of its sister spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, which in 1999 crashed into the south pole after prematurely cutting off its engines. The Polar Lander loss, along with the earlier loss of an orbiter the same year, forced NASA to overhaul its Mars exploration program.

Phoenix, named after the mythical bird that is reborn from its ashes, inherited hardware from a lander mission that was scrapped after the back-to-back Mars losses, and carries similar instruments that flew on Polar Lander.

Built by Lockheed Martin Corp., Phoenix is the first mission from NASA’s Scout program, a lower-cost complement to the space agency’s pricier Mars missions. It cost $420 million to develop and launch Phoenix, compared with the $820 million originally invested in the twin rovers.

The rovers have dazzled scientists with their Energizer Bunny-like ability to keep going and their geologic findings that ancient Mars once had water that flowed at or near the surface.

Mission managers do not expect Phoenix to be as hardy as the rovers, since winter will set in later this year at the landing site with fewer hours of sunlight available each day to power the lander’s solar panels.

This report includes information from The Associated Press and msnbc.com.

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History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man

Here are the first unprocessed images taken by the Phoenix lander on Mars, May 25, 2008 (from NASA TV).

So it's summer there now and they don't expect the lander to be able to draw enough power during the short winter days to stay thawed but I wonder if we might not get to see martian snow accumulating before everything freezes up. Might be an interesting sight from another world.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--PKD

And, here is the first detailed image (approximate color added) of the site (courtesy NASA):



This image shows a polygonal pattern in the ground near NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, similar in appearance to icy ground in the arctic regions of Earth.

Phoenix touched down on the Red Planet at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53 p.m. Eastern Time), May 25, 2008, in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis, at 68 degrees north latitude, 234 degrees east longitude.

This is an approximate-color image taken shortly after landing by the spacecraft's Surface Stereo Imager, inferred from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter.

The Phoenix Mission is led by the University of Arizona, Tucson, on behalf of NASA. Project management of the mission is by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Spacecraft development is by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

NASA has released this image captured by the Mars Orbiter of the Phoenix during its seven-minute landing:


This is the first time that a spacecraft has photographed an other spacecraft during its landing on another planet. Awesome!

Hey, damn it...


Someone explain something to me, in the days of old, NASA used to do B/W photography because they had very limited bandwidth and because "color" photography was "new" and the color was less than realistic (accurate). I've heard both of these issues stated in various documentary type shows for an explanation of the past B/W images and also how NASA did a lot of false coloring to "satisfy" the public.

In recent history I've learned how the available bandwidth has grown substantially to the point of allowing color images and I seem to know that color technology has come, well, leaps and bounds since Apollo. (No pun intended...)

So why in the hell are we still dealing with either false or approximate color images???

It seems to me that there is a whole level of science that could be confirmed with true color images.... (i.e., iron vs something else...)

Help me out, why/what am I missing???

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As much as we all love seeing the photos from other worlds, I think what you have to remember is that those instruments are there to do hard science and only secondarily (if that) take tourist snapshots for the folks back home. For whatever reason they think they can get more useful data by using a blue filter and a near infrared filter. That's telling in itself that they use one imager in the camera and swap filters in front of it. Simple optics. Simple camera. Less to go wrong, I guess.

Of course, nobody would be able to sell a stingy Congress on more funding with pretty data in a speadsheet....

As for bandwidth, it doesn't seem things have changed all that much. I found a 1970 paper on Apollo and the "high speed" telemetry transmitter operated at 100kbps. Flash forward 30 years, Spirit and Opportunity have recently been given a remote "tune up" -- new compression software it looks like -- that doubled their transmitter bandwidth.... to 256kbps.

And the further out you go the worse it gets. They get back one picture a day from Cassini.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--PKD

Here's a link to more pics:

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Phoenix-Mars-Lander/sm/events/sc/052508marslander

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History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man