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Phoenix Mars Polar Lander Website Launched
ciph3r writes "The Phoenix Mars Polar Lander mission has just launched their public website. '[The] mission is to land in the northern polar region of Mars (about 70 N latitude) in May 2008 and to expose the upper few feet of surface material using a robotic arm to find the ice that was discovered by the Odyssey mission in 2002. The history of this ice and its interaction with the martian atmosphere will be studied throughout the 3-month primary mission. This ice-rich soil may be one of the few habitable environments on Mars where a biological system can survive.'"
Nah! Phoenix is in Arizona. Sure, Sedona is famous for its red rocks, but it's not Mars!
How long before the newspapers start going crazy with the prospect of an alien invasion?
Wasn't "Phoenix" the name of Zephram Cochrans ship in Star trek: First contact?
Including you.
Is the king alive? Is he below the martian ice?
Exiting times!
It looks like they took the Twirl filter to the Firefox logo in Photoshop.
so... you want to find a place, on another planet, for people to live? Or what exaclly do you want to live on this ice?
~/.sig: No such file or directory
Does anyone know why the "o" in the Phoenix logo is the symbol for male? Also, what does the year 2007 have to do with anything?
I hope they are taking some precautions to reduce the terestrial contamination of regions of Mars where we expect there is the posibility of sustaining life. Because if we land something where there is frozen water, we could very well seed it with micro-organisms from Earth.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
So we are busy looking for decent places to go after the human race completely destroys the planet Earth.
I was wondering when they were going to send (another) spacecraft to Mars. I mean our current one(s) have been there for only 11 months.
Using "launched" to describe the introduction of a website for an interstellar mission. Gosh, they're getting their value for the minimum wage employees...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The European Mars Express probe has a radar boom that was meant to do really accurate measuring of the subsurface ice. This sounds like the sort of knowledge that would be really useful to have in deciding exactly where to aim the Phoenix mission.
But they delayed unfolding the radar boom on Mars Express after some analysis showed that the forces released in springing it open might be enough to mess up the whole spacecraft.
First it was meant to happen in April 2004, then delayed till June I think. After that I can't find any furthur information. Anyone know what the score with that is?
Their logo reminds me of Firefox
That kind of stuff only happens in movies...
I hope they send up a decent microscope this time. The one on the mars rovers are only something like 30x power; the microscopes you can buy at toys are us can go up to at least 900x, and I've even seen a 1200x one there. You'd think that with that many millions spent on the project we could get something out there that could actually *see* a microbe if there was one.
This mission bears a striking resemblance to the unsuccessful 1998 Mars Polar Lander. The Scout program is designed to identify and choose the most promising mission ideas. I am assuming that it was coincidence that the winner was a mirror to NASA's very own MPL. I'd like to think there were no other ideas (Mars Glider, etc) that should have won but didn't because this mission resembled NASA's baby.
Let's hope it doesn't mysteriously disappear like the last one we tried sending.
Their logo http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/phoenix_logo _small.jpg remembers me firefox logo!
They should add an applet that lets you control the camera on the space craft! Just think of the media exposure NASA would get!
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Yes it does bear a striking resemblence to the 1998 Mars Polar Lander mission. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the Scout isn't just a rebuild of it - hopefully with the landing gear problem fixed. ;-)
I always thought that not reusing the design and development work that went into the 1998 Mars Polar Lander is an example of NASA waste. Just because the landing gear failed to function properly is no reason to discard all the design and development time and effort that people (including myself - I spent about a year writing the firmware for the MET metrological subsystem for the 1998 mission) put into the rest of the project. Design and development is the major cost of spacecraft, and any reasonable person would simple correct the landing gear problem and try again rather than trashing the entire design and starting over from scratch.
-- Ron
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
This is part of the Mars Scout Program, which is a really neat idea. Basically, every four years, NASA sends out a request for proposals, that basically says "You've got $N amount of money. Draw up a mission you can do for that price that'll give us some useful science." It's a cheap way of getting specific science results, as opposed to billion-dollar class megaprobes. The Phoenix won because it reused existing hardware, the Mars Polar Lander. Because of that, their mission became cheaper, so they could do more stuff within the price tag. The runner up, a Mars Airplane, is something I'd like to have seen- hopefully they pick it for the 2011 Mars Scout.
After being sued by the company which makes the Phoenix BIOS, getting heckled by the Firebird project, and not being able to afford to take out an ad in the New York times proclaiming itself FireFox, has settled upon CowPoop.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I think the logo was done by the guy that used to do all the Led Zeppelin album covers.
// This is not a sig.
They'll spend most of their time in legal battles as a BIOS company and a chocolate bar company sue them into oblivion.
Actually, here's the story. The Mars Polar Lander program produced two articles. One was launched in '98, and crashed. The other was scheduled to be launched in '01, but after the crash was shelved. This Phoenix mission basically stuck new instruments on the old frame, fixed the problem on the old one, and used it. It's a very ingenious solution.
With the spectacular success of the Mars Spirit and Opportunity missions and the pending 2009 launch of a nuclear powered Mars rover, sending a stationary lander would be quite a step backwards. If a lander lands in a locally boring spot it is stuck. If a rover lands in a dull spot - as the Sprit rover did in Gusev crater- a short drive can remedy the situation. There is also no reason to dig for permafrost. A rover should be able to sample ice expose from north polar cap directly.
It seems to me that if the goal is to find habitable spots for microbes you could not do better than to examine some of gullies in the southern hemisphere where brines may be actively flowing at the surface.
an ill wind that blows no good
Interstellar? Did somebody move Mars to another star?
From a strictly scientific point of view, it doesn't appear that a glider would be very useful. It would be a great engineering project, and definitely a cool project, but it wouldn't yield much (comparatively) in the way of science.
NASA already have an office dedicated to this.
"Planetary protection activities for NASA are managed by the Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters. Our mission is to prevent biological cross-contamination that could result from NASA's solar system exploration missions."
- http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/pp/
-AC
NASA, require your scientists to learn the conversions constants between SI and Imperial units unless you want history to repeat again! PS: SI rules!
Compared to most other sites, their HTML isn't to bad. Actually uses some CSS layout.
Why those links on the top are images, and not a css rollover... that's beyond me.
Being a web standards geek... it makes me feel a little better seeing that.
Oh yea... some of the gizmo's (not available at ThinkSecret) are available to view here:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/technology/
pretty cool stuff.
Finally, a major space project based on an open-source database. This is a huge boon for OSS, though it socks MySQL in the mouth.
Stup mAkin FuN uf mee!
... reminds me of f... oh wait...
doh!
What are you suggesting?... Beowulf cluster of landers?
-AC
Well... it would work if the webcam users wouldn't mind waiting upto 40 mintues for the updated image from mars to arrive :)
-AC
I wonder if there are somewhere in NASA's back rooms, in a locked desk, a plan for a one way manned mission to Mars?
I was thinking that it would make a mission to Mars within reach almost any time, and I would be willing to bet that there would be volunteers to do it.
Much less expensive to go there, no orbiter or lander to come home. Much longer stay on the surface, no worries of long term radiation.
A nuclear powered land anywhere plane, and the astronaughts could fly all over, land where interesting, do all kinds of things.
No worries of bringing back Martian bacteria, or trying to stuff a Thoat, or Calot into a return capsule.
Think of 3 months on the surface, and then little black pill time.
This really could be done.. Not a joke.
Just an interesting thought.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
This ice-rich soil may be one of the few habitable environments on Mars where a biological system can survive.
Wouldn't it be more fun/interesting to check out the uninhabitable places that life could survive? Or maybe the habitable places it couldn't?
So, they are calling it the Phoenix mission. They are giving away by that name where the "mars surface pictures" will really be coming from. Not that the current mission is any different.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
That's Firefox Mars Lander for you!
Not quite. This mission was more stuffing the old ('01) instruments into a new frame. Because of the similarities between the '98 and '01 landers, the '01 mission was shelved until a more robust lander could be built to house some of the orphaned projects (as well as some new stuff).
Oops, Polar Lander was 2000, not '98.
*looks down at notes* Oh. Yeah. You know, you'd think that if I was privileged enough to take a design class from one of the lead engineers on the Mars Polar Lander, I'd pay better attention to what he was saying.
To summarise, some bacteria survived inside an unmanned probe NASA sent to the moon, which was then retrieved by the Apollo over two years later. It should be noted that the bacteria remained dormant through this period.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The budget for the Scout program was so tight that it would have been almost impossible to meet the criteria. Then Peter Smith suggested that they simply haul from storage and modify the existing backup MPL probe.
This means saving a shitload of money on development(that's your tax dollars). So, not a coincidence, just numbers.
I seriously doubt that a project like Glider would be able to fit within the limits and still have an acceptable chance of success.
...and you could also control the brightness of the studio lights they'd be using :)
The term Phoenix is the clue here... The craft will infact built from parts left over from the unlaunched 2001 lander project... rising from the ashes of past failure I guess...
Those parts are currtently in storage in Colorado, but will be outfitted with updated instruments and flight hardware if memory serves..
Scout missions loosely hold on to the 'faster, cheaper, better' philosophy, stressing cost and development of robotic capacity as their main objectives, and science as a lesser, but still important objective...
These technologies, once refined go into the more scientifically capable (and therefore more expensive) missions.
Although pathfinder wasn't a Scout mission officially, in spirit it definately was part of such a program... Pathfinder got dinged big for not producing much science, but the technologies employed in that mission and that are currently being employed in the new rovers (although in a heavilly modified form) has seemed to quell most dissent from the scientific community about its importance.
Phoenix likely will get similar criticism, since a lander is by far less capable than a rover and once the science is done at that spot, the mission is done.
The 'smart powered soft landing' technologies employed in this mission however, will be essential in choosing more interesting landing sites in the future... Phoenix is an engineering mission that will offer some science. The rover that follows it in 2009 will build on lessons learned from this project, but will offer roving capabillity with a full scientific payload. It will stress science over testing new technologies.
I am getting pretty sick of seeing people advertising the freeipods, freeminimacs, and web hosting in their slashdot sigs. I don't want to see your ads, but if your going to do that crap, at least don't be a rip-off, go pay slashdot for one of those ads on the sidebar.
When I mod, I will mod down any post with an ad in it.
others.
The "worth" of one human life varies from person to person.
If there are ample volunteers, then why not do it? We all die in the end anyway, some would like to die for a bigger purpose.
All your base are belong to Google.
Not to split hairs, but... Viruses are not the same as bacteria. Bacteria are well established life forms that can multiply on their own. Viruses reguire a host to provide genetic material for reproduction.