Mars lander sends Video from Red Planet's arctic

NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet's surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet's surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern polar site's soil and ice," the space agency said.

The first pictures, which the lander began taking shortly after touching down near Mars' north pole -- the end of a 422 million-mile trek -- showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could see.

"It's surprisingly close to what we expected and that's what surprises me most," said Peter Smith, the mission's principal investigator. "I expected a bigger surprise."

He added: "We see the lack of rocks that we expected, we see the polygons that we saw from space, we don't see ice on the surface, but we think we will see it beneath the surface. It looks great to me."

The Sunday landing on the Red Planet's arctic plains -- which ended a 296-day journey -- was right on target, a feat NASA's Ed Weiler compared to landing a hole-in-one with a golf ball from 10,000 miles.

The landing -- dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" -- was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who have witnessed the failure of similar missions.

In mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, they celebrated the lander's entry.

"It was better than we could have imagined," Barry Goldstein, project manager for the Phoenix mission, said.

The Phoenix's 90-day mission is to analyze the soils and permafrost of Mars' arctic tundra for signs of past or present life.

The lander is equipped with a robotic arm capable of scooping up ice and dirt to look for organic evidence that life once existed there, or even exists now.

We are not going to be able to answer the final question of is there life on Mars," said Smith, an optical scientist with the University of Arizona. "We will take the next important step. We'll find out if there's organic material associated with this ice in the polar regions. Ice is a preserver, and if there ever were organics on Mars and they got into that ice, they will still be there today."

The twin to the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft, Phoenix was supposed to travel to Mars in 2001 as the Mars Surveyor spacecraft. They were originally part of the "better, faster, cheaper" program, formulated by then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to beef up planetary exploration on a lean budget.

But Polar malfunctioned during its descent into Mars' atmosphere in 1999 and crashed. An investigation concluded that as many as a dozen design flaws or malfunctions doomed the spacecraft.

The failure of that mission, as well as another spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter the same year, led NASA to put future missions on hold and rethink the "better, faster, cheaper" approach. Mars Surveyor went to the warehouse.

But all was not lost. In 2003, Smith proposed a plan to re-engineer the Mars Surveyor and fly it on a mission to look for signatures of life in the ice and dirt of Mars far North. Mars Phoenix, literally and figuratively, rose from the ashes of Surveyor.

Engineers set to work, testing and retesting the onboard system to ferret out and fix all the flaws they could find.

"We always have to be scared to death," Goldstein said. "The minute we lose fear is the minute that we stop looking for the next problem."

The team was concerned about the Phoenix landing system. NASA had not successfully landed a probe on Mars using landing legs and stabilizing thrusters since the Viking missions in the late 1970s. The other three successful Mars landings -- Pathfinder in 1997 and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004 -- used massive airbags that inflated around the landing craft just before landing to cushion the impact.

The Phoenix doesn't have airbags because the lander is too big and heavy for them to work properly.

Its landing site was targeted for the far northern plains of Mars, near the northern polar ice cap. Data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft indicate large quantities of ice there, likely in the form of permafrost, either on the surface or just barely underground.

"Follow the water" has become the unifying theme of NASA's Mars exploration strategy.

In 2004, the rover Opportunity found evidence that a salty sea once lapped the shores of an area near Mars' equator called Meridiani Planum. Astrobiologists generally agree that it's best to look for life in wet places.
http://www.silav.net

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Phoenix
• Mars
• Lander
• NASA
• Video

[Asurael]

Whats up with the title, there was no Mars video footage, only 3D previews.

Cool vid but think about giving it a more appropiate title next time.

[dikhurtz]

Go back to handing out bibles at the airport.

[Bagatan63]

Hope not filming in MGM studio. Mars far away from the sun then?

[ILoveDominikaDetko]

They can not, but if you build a rover will be able to make a tasty Tunna Pizza

and will launch that vehicle to mars, we all will be appreciate.Specially the next humans will get there with the Constallation program, also when the pizza will taste like a mixture of sand and rusty iron. :)

[happinesson]

there are a lot of things needed to be discovery here on earth..Why are you so interested on mars?

[CognitiveNetwork]

BUT, can they bake a pizza on Mars?

[CognitiveNetwork]

So in less than 3 years they are allready going back to Mars. I supose they will start setting up a Mars base very soon. They talked about start building a base on the moon in 2015, but now it seems Mars is a better candidate.

[bubbajay716]

@crystalank1 there is air on mars but very very little and it has a carbon dioxide atmosphere

[cybermarsactual]

at least with the bibles you get something. Not just claims.

[BibiiGlendana922]

l0l_i_fÉêl_sÕ_lôNëly_töDaY

[joshua81em]

@dikhurtz or Sayings of Buddha lol

[gadgetine007]

100 years from now people are gonna be laughing at us from their Mars hotels and vacation homes lol. If we survive 2012 that is smh -_-