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Lockheed Martin Probe Will Pick Up Where Lander Failed

Posted on: Wednesday, 6 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

NASA selected Denver's Lockheed Martin on Monday to build the $325 million Phoenix Mars probe, which will rise from the ashes of a failed 1999 red planet landing.

Phoenix will carry new versions of science instruments destroyed when the Lockheed Martin-built Mars Polar Lander crashed while landing Dec. 3, 1999.

The new devices will ride into space aboard a Lockheed Martin spacecraft that was mothballed when NASA canceled its 2001 Mars Lander mission several months after Polar Lander's demise.

The 2001 mission was shelved, in part, because the spacecraft's design was based on Polar Lander. The grounded probe has been crated in a Lockheed Martin clean room since then, but it will see new life as the backbone of the Phoenix mission.

"We took experiments from Polar Lander and the spacecraft from the '01 lander and basically had them resurrected . . . and we plan to fly them to Mars," said University of Arizona planetary scientist Peter H. Smith, head of the Phoenix mission.

Named for the mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes, the Phoenix is scheduled for launch in 2007. Work will begin immediately.

The 2001 spacecraft, about the size of a dining room table, was about three-quarters finished when the mission was suspended, said Ben Clark, a planetary scientist at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

Workers at Lockheed Martin's Waterton Canyon facility will modify the craft so it can carry all the Phoenix science instruments. And the design will be upgraded to incorporate improvements suggested by the review panels that investigated the Polar Lander loss, Clark said.

Phoenix will land in a northern polar region where another Lockheed Martin-built NASA spacecraft, the Odyssey orbiter, has detected vast stores of ice just below the surface.

A robotic arm on Phoenix will dig 3 feet beneath the surface, scooping frozen soil and melting it in a set of tiny ovens to measure the water content and to look for minerals that may have formed during a wetter, warmer past climate.

Phoenix will search the soil for organic molecules that could provide clues about the possibility of past microbial life on Mars. But the probe will not attempt to find life.

The best-guess explanation for the December 1999 Polar Lander failure involves the "touchdown sensors" on the craft's three legs. The sensors tell the spacecraft when its legs touch the Mars surface. Then the probe's computer orders the landing engines to shut down.

Engineers believe that when Polar Lander's spring-loaded legs snapped open during final descent, the shock triggered the touchdown sensors, causing the engines to shut down before the probe was on the surface.

The design flaw was corrected in the 2001 lander, but doubts about the spacecraft linger, Smith said.

"If we were to take it right now and fly it without any testing, I would be scared to death," he said.

"But we're planning an extremely robust testing program, and we think we're going to to be able to send the safest lander to Mars that's ever been available for any mission," he said.

Tests will include hot-firing all the engines and simulating "every conceivable condition" the spacecraft could encounter during the mission, said Smith, whose Arizona team built cameras for both Polar Lander and the scrubbed 2001 mission.

The Phoenix mission beat out three other proposed Mars missions vying to become the first launch in NASA's new Scout program of relatively low-cost Mars spacecraft.

INFOBOX

Landing on Mars, looking for water

* Name: Phoenix Mars probe

* Cost: $325 million

* Builder: Lockheed Martin

* Launch: August 2007

* Landing: June 2008

* Length of main mission: 3 months

* Mission: To look for water in the soil

* Other Lockheed Mars projects: Two Lockheed Martin-built probes are orbiting Mars: Odyssey and Global Surveyor. The company is also building the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will be able to spot rocks the size of beach balls on the surface.

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