Phoenix Headed for Martian North Pole in 2007

jschuur writes "After narrowing down the selections to 4 finalists, NASA has chosen the Phoenix Mars lander design for its 2007 Scout Mission to the planet Mars. Phoenix, a joint project between the University of Arizona and Planetary Laboratory was designed after the doomed 1999 Mars Polar Lander and recycles much of its design and instrument ideas. A staggering $325 million grant was awarded to the University of Arizona for the project, which will also include Canadian participation. Phoenix is scheduled to land on Mars in May of 2008."

Comments

Re:tracking

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

attoparsec n.

About an inch. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K

Pay attention:

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they haven't recycled the imperial to numeric conversion code.

Um, they are recycling Mars Polar Lander, not Mars Climate Orbiter. The unit conversion omission occurred on MCO, not MPL.

MCO was already recycled and has been performing flawlessly... its reincarnation is known as Mars Odyssey.

You got a score of five because people thought you were saying something insightful about the spaceprogram. Actually, though, you don't know shit about it.

Re:Sample Return

[mikerich]

When are we going to see a sample return mission?

Phoenix was chosen ahead of a sample return mission. I haven't seen what the exact reason was, but I imagine the tight $325 million cap would have precluded a viable sample return mission.

ESA is thinking about a sample return mission at some point around 2011, but funding really depends on the success of Mars Express/Beagle 2.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Manned Missions

[mikerich]

I think they should really be shooting towards a manned mission. Having actual people on the ship makes mission completion that much more important. Do you really think they would have tried that hard to get Apollo 13 back to earth if there was no people on it? Apart from spontaneous shuttle explosions such as columbia and challenger, they would do everything they could to make sure the mission was a success.

That's thinking backwards. If you don't have astronauts to worry about you don't have to worry about the mission succeeding come what may. You do everything you can to make the mission a success - but if it doesn't - oh well, switch it off, learn a lesson and do it again.

The simple economics are in favour of unmanned missions, Phoenix will travel to Mars, touch down on another World, and perform useful science for less than half the cost of a single Shuttle launch to take water to the white elephant currently circling the planet.

Yes let's have more exploration, but let's leave Roger Ramjet back on Earth. The manned space programme has been a drain on America's coffers and NASA's resources for far too long. It's time to put it to rest.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:tracking Descent Imager included

[Anonymous Coward]

This will provide 50 Mb of images on descent, and will provide (I think) telemetry.

This is simply the Mars 2001 lander, the twin of the 1999 Polar Lander, with some new instruments, and repairs to items that likely failed on the 1999 firm landing (lander probably came down intact, may have contacted MGS, but not sufficiently to save the lander as it likely did not deploy the solar power panels (we -need- rtg on Mars!) and the batteries ran out.

Re:Recycling code too?

[QuantumFTL]

Well the software I write (as mentioned in my previous comment) runs on ground computers, and is used by the scientists. We don't need a simulator for it, because we have the actual computers here we can test on.

But yes, the flight software is tested on simulators. My officemate wrote the motor simulations for MER for testing the flight software... He says their testing methods are almost paranoid in their coverage of possible issues... In fact, they are still testing madly right now in case they find a problem, it might be able to be worked around.

Simulations are only so good. There's no way the simulations can take every little detail into account, at least with the computers we have today. It's truely amazing how many different ways hardware can fail. And don't forget cosmic rays cause random bitflips now and then...

Yes testing can uncover a lot of issues but certainly not everything.

Good question though.

Re:Recycling code too?

[RKBA]

Hi QuantumFTL,

I wrote the firmware for the Meteorological subsystem (MET) of MPL (known at the time as Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor - MVACS). It was quite depressing when MPL crashed after myself (and many others) had worked on it for so long - particularly since the MET package never even got powered on! :-(

It looks like you've substituted a scanning LIDAR for the Tunable Diode Laser (TDL) Spectrometer that we flew (or intended to fly) on MPL, and I assume (and hope) you are using a different microprocessor than we did. The UT69RH051 (the UTMC rad hard version of the 8051 microprocessor) has a very serious design flaw that we didn't discover until after flight testing had started, that causes dropped interrupts if the serial port is used in full-duplex mode. If you do happen to be using that same microcontroller, you should be aware of this advisory issued by UTMC:

UT69RH051 Microcontroller PCA & Serial Port Interrupt Flag Anomaly

If you would like to contact me for any reason, you can email me at: "SlashDot_at_spamex.com" (substitute "@" for "_at_").

Best of luck on a successful mission, and may the Phoenix rise from the ashes of MPL! :-)

-- Ron

P.S
No operating system at all (neither open source nor closed source) was used in the meteorological subsystem of MPL. The firmware I wrote was a single program that ran on the "bare metal" of the processor board, and used interrupts to effect time slicing (in effect, it was its own operating system).