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Phoenix Begins Search for Life on Mars

Posted on: Tuesday, 27 May 2008, 06:10 CDT

By Susan Kelly and Robert Davis

After pulling off a long-shot landing on Mars on Sunday night, the team behind the Phoenix mission will spend the next few days making sure its equipment is ready to begin searching for the raw ingredients necessary to support life on the planet.

The landing of NASA's Phoenix spacecraft marked the first time in 32 years that the space agency has delivered a probe on the Red Planet using retrorockets. The rover vehicles Spirit and Opportunity landed with the help of air bags.

The Phoenix lander then began transmitting images of the barren surface of Mars' northern latitudes.

"We've achieved our first major goal," principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona-Tucson said in a news conference Monday.

Cheers erupted at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., when Phoenix's radio signal came in as scheduled Sunday, indicating that the $457 million lander was in position near Mars' northern polar cap. The craft will sample the terrain for evidence of microscopic life and water.

Smith said Monday that it will be about a week before Phoenix's robotic arm takes its first scoop of the pebbly surface, which appears to contain ice that expands and contracts. That process is believed to be responsible for the polygon shapes in the surface.

About two hours after touchdown, mission controllers got word that the craft's solar arrays had deployed. The twin 6-foot circular disks are the power source.

Then the team saw that the cover that protected the robotic arm did not retract completely, but engineers don't believe it will inhibit the arm's ability to reach the surface and start digging.

New images from Phoenix, expected nightly, will be posted at www.nasa.gov/phoenix. "What we're looking at is a surface of Mars that we've never seen before," said Dan McCleese, JPL's chief scientist.

This happy ending to Phoenix's 422-million-mile, nine-month journey was far from a safe bet. Of the 11 missions that have tried to land probes on Mars since 1971 -- by the USA, Russia and Great Britain -- only five had succeeded. Now the number is six of 12.

"We are now very confident we will be able to fulfill all of our goals," says Barry Goldstein, project manager at JPL. Though Phoenix is expected to work only for about three months, Goldstein says, the team will try to continue to get information for as long as Phoenix can withstand plunging temperatures: "We're going to operate until Mars freezes over."

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On the Net:

Mars Phoenix Mission

Source: USA TODAY

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