Phoenix Mars lander
From FutureNovo - Anticipating things to come
NASA's Phoenix Mars lander landed at Mars' north pole, making the first soft landing on Mars in thirty years. Phoenix touched down on the Red Planet at 7:53pm Eastern Time, May 25, 2008, in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis, at 68 degrees north latitude, 234 degrees east longitude.
This image (right), one of the first captured by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, shows the vast plains of the northern polar region of Mars. The flat landscape is strewn with tiny pebbles and shows polygonal cracking, a pattern seen widely in Martian high latitudes and also observed in permafrost terrains on Earth. The polygonal cracking is believed to have resulted from seasonal freezing and thawing of surface ice.
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.
[edit] Additional photos
 Solar panels unfurled |
 Lander foot pedal on Mars soil |
 Phoenix Mars Lander team celebrates |
[edit] Background
The Phoenix Mars Lander will investigate a site in the far north of Mars. The mission will seek to answer questions about that part of Mars and help resolve broader questions about the planet. The key questions Phoenix will address concern water and conditions that could support life.
The Phoenix landing region has water ice in soil close to the surface, which NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter discovered for much of the high-latitude terrain in both the north and south hemispheres of Mars.
Phoenix will dig down to the icy layer. It will examine soil in place at the surface, at the icy layer and in between. It will scoop up samples for analysis by its onboard instruments. One key instrument will check for water and carbon-containing compounds by heating soil samples in tiny ovens and examining the vapors that are given off. Another will test soil samples by adding water and analyzing the dissolution products. Cameras and microscopes will provide information on scales spanning eight powers of 10, from features that could fit by the hundreds into the period at the end of this sentence to a survey of the landscape by a mast-mounted camera. A weather station will provide information about atmospheric processes in an arctic region where a coating of carbon-dioxide ice comes and goes with the seasons.
Mars is a vast desert where water is not found in liquid form on the surface, even in places where mid-day temperatures exceed the melting point of ice. One exception may be fleeting outbreaks that have been proposed to explain modern-day flows down some Martian gullies. Today’s arid surface is not the whole story, though. Previous Mars missions have found that liquid water has persisted at times in Mars’ past and that water ice near the surface remains plentiful today.
