Phoenix to Touch Down Tomorrow (Sunday)

PASADENA, Calif. - After a nearly 10-month journey, a NASA spacecraft will land softly Sunday on the northern polar region of Mars, if all goes as planned.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is set to touch down in a broad, shallow valley in the Martian arctic plains believed to hold a vast supply of underground ice. Phoenix's job during the 90-day mission is to excavate the soil and ice to study whether the site could have supported microbial life.

The stakes are especially high: Fewer than half of the world's attempts to land on the Red Planet have succeeded.

"I'm getting a real case of heebie-jeebies," Joe Guinn, mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on the eve of the landing.

In keeping with tradition, JPL project manager Barry Goldstein plans to hand out bags of peanuts — both salted and unsalted — to his team members on landing day. Over the years, JPL found that missions with the lucky charms have better success than those without.

"I don't tempt fate," Goldstein said during a tour of mission control.

Phoenix is the first to attempt to land in Mars' high northern latitudes. The lander will rely on its heat shield, parachute and a dozen thrusters to slow itself down from 12,000 mph to 5 mph. The risky descent takes about seven minutes.

NASA has not had a successful powered landing in more than 30 years since the twin Viking landers in 1976. The last time NASA tried was in 1999 when the Mars Polar Lander prematurely cut off its engines and crashed into the south pole. The Polar Lander loss came during a communications blackout.

Phoenix, on the other hand, will be closely watched by a flotilla of Mars orbiters hovering overhead that will relay information to Earth.

The weather looks ideal for landing, said Peter Smith, principal investigator of the University of Arizona, Tucson, which leads the $420 million mission.

A dust cloud swept through the target site several days ago, but it did not linger and should not affect the spacecraft, Smith said.

If successful, Phoenix will join two other spacecraft on the Martian surface — the rovers Spirit and Opportunity — which landed in 2004 and have been exploring opposite sides of the equatorial plains.

Unlike the twin rovers, Phoenix is designed to stay in one spot and extend its long robotic arm to dig trenches in the permafrost. It has an onboard laboratory to heat the soil and analyze the vapors for traces of organic compounds, an essential ingredient for life.

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MC said:

VideoJinx, if you insist on pushing your claims that all of this was stagged and what not, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Edit

Anyway, I hope nothing bad happens while Phoenix is conducting it's operations.

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VideoJinx said:

I'm not claimin the landing itself to be a hoax, but the notion that "all of this is new to them" claim is what i call a hoax >_>.. anything that's released is already known imo

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The mission has two goals. One is to study the geologic history of water, the key to unlocking the story of past climate change. The second is to search for evidence of a habitable zone that may exist in the ice-soil boundary, the "biological paydirt". Phoenix's instruments are suitable for uncovering information on the geological and possibly biological history of the Martian Arctic. Phoenix will be the first mission to return data from either of the poles, and will contribute to NASA's main strategy for Mars exploration, "Follow the water".

The primary mission is anticipated to last 90 sols (Martian days) — just over 92 Earth days. Researchers are hoping that the lander could survive into the Martian winter to witness the polar ice developing at the spacecraft's exploration area. As much as three feet of solid carbon dioxide ice could appear there. The lander is unlikely to survive through the winter.

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Sub said:

Yes, Nasa is actually in desperate need of funding. Now please, stop with the conspiracies, this isn't the topic for it.

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Now please, stop with the conspiracies, this isn't the topic for it.

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Outspoken alarmists over global warming have NASA Goddard connections because NASA has fudged data to support the idea that the Sun - the model for all other stars in the cosmos - is a ball of hydrogen (H).

It is not. Lightweight elements cover the surfaces of stars. The Sun's surface is 91% H and 9% He (helium), the lightest and next lightest elements, respectively.

NASA does not want the public to know that the Sun controls our climate because, the public pays attention to the weather, and this might expose the lies that NASA has told us about the Sun - the only star close enough for detailed study.

NASA has ignored the results of measurement after measurement on the Sun since 1960 which showed that the Sun separates elements by mass and selectively moves hydrogen - the lightest of all elements - to the solar surface.

Here is a link to the data:

http://www.omatumr.com/data.html

The data are summarized here:

1. "Composition of the solar interior: Information from isotope ratios," European Space Agency SP-517 (editor: Huguette Lacoste, 2003) pp. 345-348.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0410717

2. "Isotopes tell origin and operation of the Sun," AIP Conference Proceedings, volume 822 (2006) pp. 206-225.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0510001

3. "Solar abundance of elements from neutron-capture cross sections," 36th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Abstract # 1033, Houston, TX, 14-18 March 2005

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0412502

4. "The Sun is a plasma diffuser that sorts atoms by mass," Physics of Atomic Nuclei 69 (2006) pp. 1847-1856.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609509

With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel

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