Mars Craft May Answer the Ultimate Question: Project is Fraught With Danger ? but Could Be a Scientific Bonanza
By Dan Sorenson, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson
Apr. 29–The University of Arizona will lead the Phoenix Mars Mission to the red planet’s north polar region. Possible findings range from subsurface water ice — to evidence of life. During the mission’s three to five months of scientific work — before the pole is socked in by its winter layer of supercold CO2 “dry ice” — the lander’s cameras, weather station, scientific ovens and wet laboratory will also analyze soil and study trenches dug by its robotic arm, photograph clouds and study winds. –Dan Sorenson / Arizona Daily Star Getting the UA-led Phoenix Mars Mission to the red planet’s north pole means shaking, freezing and baking a pile of gee-whiz technology during liftoff and a nine-month trip — and then smacking into Mars’ atmosphere at roughly 7,500 miles per hour and surviving both a jolting parachute opening and a blind landing.
Even that won’t be enough to declare the mission — the first NASA Mars project led by a public university — a success. Once on Mars, the flat-topped flying science lab will search, dig and sniff for water, secrets of its soil and atmosphere, and, the ultimate payoff, signs of life.
The lander, packed with camera and science gear, is to be launched atop a Delta 2 rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Aug. 3 and land on Mars Memorial Day weekend, late May 2008.
The Phoenix mission’s name symbolizes its “rising from the ashes” of two failed attempts to explore Mars. It uses instruments from the Mars Polar Lander, which failed to return data from Mars’ antarctic region in December 1999, and the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander, which was mothballed before it ever went to Mars.
Getting the lander and its instruments to Mars is up to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, NASA’s longtime partner in unmanned spaceflight and project manager of the Phoenix Mars Mission. The science is in the hands of the UA.
Expectations are high. Finding signs of life on the neighboring planet could raise interest in space travel and offer the first sign that Mars could support human exploration.
A crash or destructive landing, like those that plagued NASA on Mars several years ago, would be “a grave disappointment to all of us,” UA space program veteran William Boynton says. But the lander was built by contractor Lockheed Martin in Denver, and a failure would most likely be a hardware problem, he says.
Whatever happens, he doubts the UA’s scientific reputation would take too big a hit.
“It’s possible that one of the instruments the UA is responsible for might fail, in which case it would be a bit of mud on our face,” Boynton says. “But that can happen on any mission.”
What will happen
Peter Smith, the UA’s principal investigator on the science mission, is so confident about the mission’s outcome that he’s almost matter-of-fact in his belief that the lander will find water in the form of ice in the polar soil. The surface ice that forms Mars’ polar caps is frozen carbon dioxide — “dry ice” — not water.
Analysis of the unique light “signature” of the elements in Mars’ polar regions shows the presence of far too much hydrogen for it to be anything other than the H in frozen H2O, planetary scientists believe.
Beyond merely confirming the presence of water, Smith says, scientists want to know how it got to the poles. They suspect that, instead of flowing, water on Mars might move as clouds.
That’s because Mars’ atmosphere is so thin compared with Earth’s that it doesn’t insulate, so ice goes instantly from solid to vapor without spending any time as liquid. Therefore, it exists only in the subsurface soil.
To study it, the Phoenix’s backhoe-like robotic arm will dig up a soil sample — expected to contain a large amount of ice — and dump it into automated lab instruments on the lander’s deck. Then the lab gear will analyze it and send back the results.
The UA’s space program is best known for imaging, the development and use of cameras and other remote sensing techniques. The Phoenix lander is loaded with cameras, though not all developed by the UA.
The views range from an extreme wide-angle panoramic cam to a camera on the lander’s Swiss-built atomic microscope able to give a detailed view of “the surface of a grain of sand,” Smith says. There’s even a camera, with colored LED lighting, on the robotic arm so the science team can see what’s in the scoop.
Data will be uplinked during 10-minute windows as the Mars Reconnaissance and Odyssey orbiters blaze across the Martian sky. A deal with the European Space Agency will allow the Phoenix Mars Mission to use its orbiter as a backup data relay.
When the orbiters have a clear shot at Earth, they’ll relay information to the Deep Space Network’s dishes spaced around our planet.
Waiting in a big, dimly lit room at the UA’s warehouse-size Science Operations Center near Drachman and Stone avenues, the mission’s science team — experts in biology, atmospherics, geology and chemistry-mineralogy — will pounce on each day’s incoming data. They’ll have to quickly decide what the incoming information means and what they want the lander’s instruments, cameras and tools to do next. It will be like painting with a blindfold on, seeing what they’ve done a day later.
A second crew will write coded commands, uplinking a to-do list of the lander’s next-day chores via the orbiters.
The science team’s room won’t have any cues as to time of day because a Martian day is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, says Andy Shaner, the Phoenix Mars Mission’s education and public outreach coordinator. He says it’s been shown that the creeping time change between the Earthbound crew’s two worlds can make it hard to work effectively. So, Shaner says, they’ll be living and working on Martian time.
The work for the first part of the science period will be grueling, 24/7 for at least the first 90 days, Smith says. Then, after a few weeks, when the one-time-use lab ovens and the wet lab’s chemicals are expended, things could ease up.
Looking at the risks
As former co-investigator on the UA’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, HiRISE, Smith figured he could count on the orbiting camera for some help in scoping out possible landing sites for Phoenix. When it started sending back stunning images of Mars’ surface last fall he was sure of it.
The UA science team had already picked an area that seemed safe based on earlier photos from orbiting cameras.
“The first thing HiRISE showed up was the area we picked had boulders the size of minivans,” Smith recalls.
That, he said, wouldn’t do. Even if the lander didn’t crash into a huge boulder, the rock might be close enough to shade its solar panels, cutting off its power.
With some help from HiRISE, Smith says, they were able to settle on an area — soon named “Green Valley” — where there is an average of only two desk-sized boulders for an area about the size of two football fields side-by-side.
The lander has no hazard-avoidance landing system. And it can’t be operated remotely in real time from Earth because of how long it will take for images to reach Earth and steering commands to return to the spacecraft.
Because a single part failure could disable the entire lander, every part is torture-tested. The whole lander was tested — under heat, cold and pressure — in a huge chamber at builder Lockheed Martin’s Denver plant, Smith says.
The mission’s potential
Mission scientists have done all they can to prevent any unpleasant surprises.
But they hope science will deliver them a pleasant surprise. Finding evidence of any life, past or present, would be a blockbuster, Smith says.
But he also cautions that deciding whether there is or isn’t life on Mars on the basis of one lander’s work is absurd.
“You only land on one spot,” he says. “Imagine dropping down on Siberia and on the basis of one hole saying” there is or isn’t life on Earth.
“We may miss it,” he says with a shrug about determining whether life is, or was, present. But he is confident about finding water in the form of subsurface ice.
And while that may almost be a given, considering all the indications of water past and present collected by earlier Mars orbiting cameras, sensors and rovers, to actually touch it would be huge because water is one of the keys to life — at least in nearly all the forms known on Earth.
A suicide mission
Even if all goes perfectly, it’s a suicide mission.
This won’t be one of those valiant space machines that keeps sending home news long past its anticipated lifetime, the way many have.
“Phoenix has a life of about five months,” says Smith. “Then it will freeze up with CO2 ice, 120 or 130 below. That ice is going to destroy our spacecraft. We have promised we can do the science in three months, but we’re not going to turn it off if it’s still working.”
But during those three months — or until the CO2 ice swallows it and the darkness chokes off its solar power — it will continue to sniff the Martian atmosphere, take pictures and beam its reports back to a rambling one-story building in simmering Tucson.
View the slide show
View the slide show
Amount spent on the Phoenix Mars Mission.
Surface Stereoscopic Imager: The “eyes” of the lander provide images of the deck and surrounding terrain.
Meteorological station: Devices record daily weather data.
UHF antenna: Allows communication between lander and Earth.
MECA: A combination of several scientific instruments designed to look for signatures of life.
Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer: Used to analyze soil and ice samples (gathered by the robotic arm) to determine their elemental composition.
Solar panels: (One on each side of lander.) Gather sunlight, which is used to charge the lander’s batteries.
Robotic arm: Used to dig trenches and gather soil and ice samples. Arm can dig trenches up to 3 feet deep. Also features a camera, left, that looks into the bucket so scientists can watch their work.
You can’t go to Mars, but . . . Phoenix Mars Mission Open House — “Cinco de Mars” — will feature a copy of the Phoenix Mars Lander and instruments displayed on a simulated Mars polar-landing site.
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, May 5.
Where: Phoenix Mission Science Operations Center, North Sixth Avenue at East Drachman Street.
Parking: UA’s Second Street Garage.
Free shuttle: From UA Student Union circle.
Admission: Free.
–Contact reporter Dan Sorenson at 573-4185 or dsorenson@azstarnet.com
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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