For the last nine-and-a-1half-months, the Phoenix spacecraft has been looping around the Sun, closing the distance between Earth and Mars. 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.
For the last nine-and-a-1half-months, the Phoenix spacecraft has been looping around the Sun, closing the distance between Earth and Mars. The probe landed on May 25 at 4:53 pm PDT (7:53 pm EDT/2353 GMT) after a do-or-die plunge through the planet`s thin atmosphere and thruster-jet landing to the Mars surface. It marked the first time that a spacecraft had successfully landed at one of the planet`s polar regions since NASA`s hefty Viking 2 lander set down in 1976. 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.
Phoenix`s science team, led by principle investigator Peter Smith at the University of Arizona, Tucson, had been eagerly preparing for Mars landing with a series of training simulations.
The search for water is important because all known life forms require it to survive, but no spacecraft has ever ‘touched’ water. NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander will be the first. The Mars Global Surveyor discovered evidence that shows liquid water recently flowed on the Martian surface. In addition, discoveries made by Mars Odyssey indicate that there are large amounts of subsurface water-ice in the northern arctic plains. This region is the focus of the Phoenix Mars Mission.
Phoenix will study the history of water and search for complex organic molecules in the ice-rich soil.
