|
Artist’s concept of
Phoenix on Mars
Friday's scheduled launch of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has been postponed by 24 hours. The two available launch times on Saturday 4 August are 10:26 am GMT (05:26 am EDT) and 11.02 am GMT (06:02 am EDT)
The spacecraft will start its journey onboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Phoenix will descend and land on the Red Planet’s northern plains, in the area known as Vastitas Borealis, in May 2008, where it will claw down into the icy soil. Once on the surface the scientists will have three months to complete their tasks before the Martian winter sets in and the solar panels no longer provide enough power to run the instruments.
Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, who support the UK involvement in the mission said, “Even though Mars has rovers on its surface and satellites remote sensing it from orbit it continues to intrigue and amaze us. By landing on the northern plains Phoenix will give us an insight into the icy world beneath, furthering our quest to find out whether conditions exist for past or present life on Mars."
The mission represents the first attempt to actually touch and analyse Martian water in the form of buried ice. The spacecraft will investigate whether frozen water near the Martian surface might periodically melt enough to sustain a habitable zone for primitive microbes. In order to accomplish this and other key goals Phoenix will carry the most sophisticated set of advanced research tools ever used on Mars, including a robotic arm, camera, surface stereoscopic imager, thermal and evolved gas analyser, a microscopy, electrochemistry and conductivity analyser, a meteorological station and a Mars descent imager.
Dr Tom Pike heads up the Phoenix team from Imperial College London. They have provided micro-machined silicon substrates which provide a surface on which to hold the dust and soil samples for analysis in the microscope station attached to the Phoenix Lander. The grains of Martian dust and soil, delivered by a mechanical excavating arm, will be imaged by an optical microscope and an atomic force microscope. Together they will provide the highest resolution of imaging ever taken on another planet.
|
Artist’s concept of
Phoenix on Mars
Dr Pike explains, “Nobody has looked at Mars at this type of resolution before. It is very difficult to predict what we might find, but if you wanted to look for signs of the earliest forms of past or present life we will be the first to look closely enough.”
The team has been conducting trials on a replica of Phoenix’s microscope station based at Imperial. They have been using the equipment for several months to work out the best way of studying the Martian soil.
A further objective of Phoenix is to monitor the polar weather and the interaction of the atmosphere with the surface. David Catling from University of Bristol is a science team co-investigator on the mission who will be studying this relationship in detail. He explains, “The polar atmosphere during summer is a different environment compared to that visited by previous landers. The sun is always above the horizon and so heats the surface and atmosphere throughout the day. As a consequence the polar summer time atmosphere is not subject to the huge daily temperature swings that are experienced at lower latitudes. Northern summer is also the time of year when water vapour is driven off ice at Mars’ north polar cap and enters the atmosphere.
He adds, “The present is often a key to the past. In studying the movement and behaviour of water on present day Mars, we can better understand how it may have behaved previously. In the past, Mars experienced big ice ages when water ice extended into the tropics and probably melted in some places, providing possible habitats for life.”
For further details about Phoenix see the mission website (link opens in a new window)|.
Notes for editors
Contacts
-
Gill Ormrod – Science and Technology Facilities Council
Press Office
Tel: + 44 (0)1793 442012
Mobile: + 44 (0)781 8013509
-
Colin Smith – Imperial College London Press Office
Tel: + 44 (0)207 5946712
Out of hours duty press officer: +44 (0)7803 886248
-
Dr Cherry Lewis – University of Bristol Press Office
Tel: + 44 (0)117 9288086
Mobile: + 44 (0)7729 421885
-
Guy Webster – NASA PR
Tel: 00 1 818 354 6278
UK Science contacts
-
Dr Tom Pike – Imperial College London (in US from 2 August)
Can be contacted through Colin Smith - details above
-
David Catling – University of Bristol (in US from 2 August)
Tel: + 44 (0)117 9545378
Phoenix resources
Images and captions
-
Image
- Artist’s concept of Phoenix on Mars. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander monitors the atmosphere overhead and reaches out to the soil below in this artist's depiction of the spacecraft fully deployed on the surface of Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL
-
Image
- Artist’s concept of Phoenix on Mars. NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander monitors the atmosphere overhead and reaches out to the soil below in this artist's depiction of the spacecraft fully deployed on the surface of Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Lockheed Martin
-
Image
- Terrain type for Phoenix landing. This view shows the texture of the ground in the area favored as a landing site for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The pattern resembles permafrost terrain on Earth, where cycles of thawing and freezing cause cracking into polygon shapes. This is a subframe, covering a patch of ground about 700 meters (2,300 feet) across, from a larger image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 11, 2006.
Credit: NASA/JPL – Caltech/University of Arizona
NASA Press Conference
NASA have a pre-launch press conference planned for August 1 scheduled for 6pm GMT (1pm EDT) from Kennedy Space Center. Further information about the briefings can be found on the NASA website (link opens in a new window)|.
Launch Coverage
A live feed of video during key launch activities from the mission’s control room a Cape Canaveral Air Force Station will be carried on NASA TV Media Channel between 8.30 am GMT and 12 noon GMT (3.30 am and 7am EDT) on August 3. For further details see the NASA website (link opens in a new window)|.
Peter Smith is Principal Investigator for Phoenix from the University of Arizona, Tucson with project management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the development partnership located at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, the Max Planck Institute, Germany and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Additional information about the mission is available on the NASA website (link opens in a new window)| and further details about NASA’s Mars programme (link opens in a new window)|.
