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

Stupid joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean the Firebird Mars Lander?

tracking

[DaHat]

... please let this one incorporate better tracking so they can monitor it all the way to the ground... just in case this like a few other notable Martian craft go plunging into the ground at around 300 mph... we can at least see where and how it hit.

just for a change...

[iainl]

Rather than make a firebird gag, lets point out that they are delivering it there because the martians called and requested it.

Yes folks, they placed an "Order of the Phoenix".

B'dumph T'sssh.

doesn't matter to me

[selfabuse]

heh, I never liked Arizona anyway.

Not so staggering

[PaschalNee]

A staggering $325 million grant was awarded to the University of Arizona

I don't see what is so staggering about this amount. For example, I'm guessing hundreds of millions of $ are spent every year designing cars. Cars that are never more than a few miles away from a local garage. If your sending a device a few million miles away you'd want to be pretty sure it's going to work. Not a inexpensive proposition. There are no Pep Boys on Mars

Manned Missions

[CastrTroy]

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. It seems that people don't care when billions of tax dollars of spacecraft are lost. However, if a few astronauts die, The world comes to a standstill. Having people on the missions would probably make them have a much higher success rate.

Re:Manned Missions

[Paulrothrock]

In "The Case for Mars," Zubrin talks about the court bureaucrats in China. The emporer had opened up china in the late 1300s and sent treasure fleets to Indonesia, India, Arabia, and even the west coast of Africa. They had seven masts when European ships had at most two.

Then the emporer died. The bureaucrats though he had wasted funds on a folly of an idea (exploration) when more important things needed to be done at home, like irrigation projects. They ordered the fleets destroyed just as they were about to enter the Mediterranean, and China was subjugated by Europeans who had the will to explore and the courage to accept the risks.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's ideas like yours that poison exploratory programs. Instead of grand gestures, you want small cheap steps. You speak of needs at home when they can be solved by innovating for the world. Material hyper efficient fuel cells and computers, inexpensive access to fusionable materials, and cheap metals and chemicals are all available in space. We must have the courage and conviction to simply reach out and grab them, and this can be done for a small percentage of the GNP. Merely increasing NASA's budget to the same percentage of the federal budget as it was during the Apollo era and providing a lofty goal will be enough for NASA to land several humans on Mars and more (like develop an economical heavy-lift launch vehicle). We simply have to want it enough.

Re:Manned Missions

[mikerich]

Then the emporer died. The bureaucrats though he had wasted funds on a folly of an idea (exploration) when more important things needed to be done at home, like irrigation projects. They ordered the fleets destroyed just as they were about to enter the Mediterranean, and China was subjugated by Europeans who had the will to explore and the courage to accept the risks.

Perhaps Zubrin should read his history a little more carefully before extrapolating from it. China was not overrun as a direct consequence of failing to explore the World. Its descent from a pre-eminent power started in the late Qing Dynasty which was in 1840. China had become decentralised, its bureaucracy was corrupt and their was a prevalent belief in an impending apocalypse. Note the lack of international reasons for a decline in Chinese power - these were internal structural problems. China had been through them before - but this time there was a difference...

China ran up against the newly emergent European superpowers, who were expanding their influence in the region. Britain was a more powerful country - China declined.

Zubrin's example is doubly flawed in that he extrapolates from a situation (albeit badly) where there is a clear winner and a clear loser to a situation where it is impossible to see what could be gained. Mars could never be an economic benefit to Earth, it has nothing of use, its too far away and its too hostile.

Material hyper efficient fuel cells and computers, inexpensive access to fusionable materials, and cheap metals and chemicals are all available in space.

None of them are on Mars, none of them require manned exploration, many of them probably don't even require space travel. Cheap metals are available on Earth (commodities and bulk chemicals are continuing to fall in price). There is nothing out there that we need to grab.

Saying we've got to go and get it when we have no need nor any conceivable need for it (whatever it is) is the economics of the British Empire (or more recently, the Pentagon). It's always someone else's money after all.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's ideas like yours that poison exploratory programs. Instead of grand gestures, you want small cheap steps. You speak of needs at home when they can be solved by innovating for the world.

And its that attitude of the seizing the Last Frontier that has produced white elephant after white elephant, whether it is the Shuttle, Concorde, BAM, NMD, fast breeder reactors - you name it. People are so busy convincing themselves that these things will be vital in the future, they forget to ask one question - why?

We simply have to want it enough.

Easy question then? Why do you want to send humans to Mars?

Best wishes,
Mike.

Top 10 Reasons to Send Phoenix to Mars

[AtariAmarok]

10. That old 1981 pontiac is now so rusty that even the junk yards won't take it.

9. Cyclops and Wolverine have been fighing over her for 26 years no. Enough is enough, get her out of the picture.

8. As part of the deal for acquiring the Phoenix Suns, the Martian sports magnate had to buy the whole city.

7. The NHL Phoenix Coyotes got tired of all the ribbing about having a hockey team where there is no ice. The Martian poles way outfreeze Canada. Put that in your back-bacon, Maple Leafs!

6. They wanted to keep those 133 degree summer temperatures. All they have to do now is replace the "+" with a "-".

5. It's part of a plot by Scottsdale to take over the state.

4. "Project Phoenix" wants to shut down by finding Phoenix as the example of life on another planet.

3. It's punishment for the city name violating one of J.K. Rowling's book title trademarks.

2. Get rid of it already, it is too confusing to remember whether or not the O goes before the E.

1. "Because it blocks my view of Tucson".

Was this better than alternatives?

[adlai]

Personally, I think there are a couple of things worth noting regarding this decision. 1st -- although $325 million is a bit "staggering", it's interesting to note that this is the first mission competition that really was a winner take all competition. 30 proposals were submitted, 4 made the finals, and then one winner was picked. I have to think NASA will be doing a lot more of this, since it's got to be more economical in the long-run.

2nd, one of the losers was the extremely cool ARES Martian Airplane proposal. I'm biased because some of the people in my lab were on the science team for that proposal, but I think it would have pushed both the scientific and engineering envelope more than Phoenix will. Was NASA being too conservative (like I think), or simply prudent? I think it's probably hard to tell right now. I sure hope ARES has a shot in 2011 if they run another Scout competition, since I think it'll remain a cool idea even then...

See this story in the Hampton Roads paper if you are more interested about ARES' s rejection/want to see a picture of the prototype.

Proof of alien life...

[pir8garth]

Proof of alien life was captured on film; much to the surprise of the people at NASA, a careless martian forgot to throw away his bottle of Aquafina...

Re:Recycling code too?

[QuantumFTL]

Dislaimer: I write software for Mars missions, including the 2007 Pheonix mission.

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

I must say I'm really tired of hearing about this every time there's an article about a mars misson. I mean, no one says "I hope they haven't recycled those overflow errors" every time an Ariane 5 rocket is lauched! Was it a stupid problem? Yes, however people seem to forget how rediculously hard it is to successfully launch a mission like this. Yes it's very easy to prevent a single mistake, but thousands of potential mistakes? Our track record with Mars probes is twice as good as the nearest competitor (Russia) and it's looking to continue that way.

Somebody want to contribute an open source alternative to them?

Look. The people working at NASA know how to write this stuff. That's not the problem. The problem is that on large scale projects like this, it's entirely possible for things like this to be overlooked... People tend to worry about the "hard" stuff rather than the easy stuff. And as for why they even have to convert units, as far as I understand NASA generally uses metric, it is the american aerospace companies that generally insist on using imperial units.

Also, Open Source is *NOT* the catch-all answer for everything! The development team I'm on uses linux for our development, and our software will be running on a lot of linux (and windows) boxes during the mission. We love open source, and even use some open libraries (such as castor) in our code as allowed (we are not allowed to link to GPL code of course).

However, I would cringe if the flight software was some open source deal... I mean, looking at the linux kernel sources, (some say it is the gem of open source) I wouldn't want to have to depend on anything written like *THAT* to handle flying in space. Great for on the ground where we can fix/replace/patch if there's a problem but... It's not cleanly designed and implemented like, say, QNX, etc. Few people alive have experience writing software for spaceflight systems, and I expect they they know just a little bit more about it than even the best of linux hackers do.

I guess I just don't understand why the parent post was modded insightful. Nothing personal, in7ane, but really!