First Mission to Touch Martian Water-Ice Launched

First Mission to Touch Martian Water-Ice Launched



Aug. 2007  - NASA's Phoenix Mars 
Mission blasted off Saturday, aiming for the Red Planet's polar region. 
Designed to be the first mission to touch Martian water-ice, the 
spacecraft is equipped to dig up and analyze icy soil that lies just 
beneath the Martian surface. 
Poised atop a Delta II rocket, the spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral 
Air Force Base at 5:26 am EDT into the sky above Florida's Atlantic coast.
 
An hour and a half later, the Phoenix established communications with its 
ground team after separating from the third stage of the launch vehicle. 
"The launch team did a spectacular job getting us on the way," said Barry 
Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 
Pasadena, California. "We are well within expected limits for a successful 
journey to the red planet. We are all thrilled!" 
Phoenix is expected to reach Mars on May 25, 2008, after a 10 month, 422 
million mile journey through space. 
"Today's launch is the first step in the long journey to the surface of 
Mars. We certainly are excited about launching, but we still are concerned 
about our actual landing, the most difficult step of this mission," said 
Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona's 
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Tucson. 
The mission will study the history of the water in the ice, monitor 
weather of the polar region, and investigate whether the subsurface 
environment in the far-northern plains of Mars has ever been favorable for 
sustaining microbial life. 
"Our instruments are specially designed to find evidence for periodic 
melting of the ice and to assess whether this large region represents a 
habitable environment for Martian microbes," said Smith. "Water is central 
to every type of study we will conduct on Mars." 
The Canadian contribution to the mission is a weather station about the 
size of breadbox that includes specially adapted Light Direction and 
Ranging, LIDAR, technology. 
The first Canadian instrument to track daily weather on another planet, 
the lidar will determine the position, structure and optical properties of 
clouds, fog and dust in Mars' lower atmosphere. 
"To be part of a Canadian mission on another planet, I can’t even put that 
into words,” says Dr. Cameron Dickinson of Dalhousie University who helped 
design the LIDAR for Mars. "It’s a first, so there’s extra pressure." 
"Information gathered by our instrumentation on the formation and movement 
of clouds, fogs, and dust plumes will add valuable new insights into the 
climate of Mars and the planet’s potential for supporting life,” said 
Canadian lead scientist on the project, Jim Whiteway, associate professor 
of space engineering at York University.

An even bigger hurdle will arise next May when Phoenix’s solar-powered 
lander descends on a previously untouched Martian polar region. 
If the landing succeeds, Canadian scientists will travel to Tucson, where 
they will use an array of satellites to remotely operate the LIDAR. The 
Phoenix Mars lander is also equipped with a robotic arm to dig through 
Martian soil and ice in the arctic region, and onboard scientific 
instruments will analyze the samples. 
The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first of NASA's competitively proposed and 
selected Mars Scout missions, supplementing the agency's core Mars 
Exploration Program, whose theme is "follow the water." 
The University of Arizona was selected to lead the mission in August 2003 
and is the first public university to lead a Mars exploration mission. 
Phoenix uses the main body of a lander originally made for a 2001 mission 
that was cancelled before launch. 
"During the past year we have run Phoenix through a rigorous testing 
regimen," said Ed Sedivy, Phoenix spacecraft program manager for Lockheed 
Martin Space Systems, Denver, which built the spacecraft. 
"The testing approach runs the spacecraft and integrated instruments 
through actual mission sequences, allowing us to assess the entire system 
through the life of the mission while here on Earth," said Sedivy. 
Samples of soil and ice collected by the lander's robotic arm will be 
analyzed by instruments mounted on the deck. 
One key instrument will check for water and compounds containing carbon 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 10 
powers of 10, from features that could fit by the hundreds into a period 
at the end of a sentence to an aerial view taken during descent. A weather 
station will provide information about atmospheric processes in the arctic 
region. 
Other international contributors include the University of Neuchatel in 
Switzerland, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the Max Planck 
Institute in Germany, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. 

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