Mars Phoenix Probe Successfully Launched

necro81 writes "The Mars Phoenix lander, built from the ashes of two earlier Mars missions, successfully launched atop a Delta II rocket from Canaveral this morning. The mission takes the 350-kg lander to northern latitudes (comparable to Greenland or Siberia) to investigate subsurface ice for the chemical precursors of life. The lander should arrive on Mars on May 25, 2008. 'NASA has never attempted to land a spacecraft on Mars at such a high northern latitude. A lander intended for the red planet's South Pole went silent immediately upon arrival in 1999. That failure, combined with the loss of the companion Mars orbiter, prompted NASA to cancel a 2001 lander mission. The parts from that scrapped mission were used for Phoenix, thus its name, which alludes to the mythological bird that rises from its own ashes.'"

Comments

Canadian Content

[zapwow]

Included on the lander is a Canadian-built weather station.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/04/mars -lander.html

Re:Canadian Content

[wigaloo]

The Canadian contribution to the mission is a meteorological station that includes a pressure sensor, three temperature sensors on a mast, a wind telltale, and a lidar (laser radar) system. The lidar will be used to obtain profiles of dust in the atmosphere, and uses a technique very similar to radar or sonar but using pulses of laser light instead. We use lidar systems here on Earth to profile aerosols, ozone, clouds, etc here on earth. The Can con will be complemented by other instruments for atmospheric measurements, including the Stereoscopic Surface Imager (SSI) which will take pictures of the sky through a variety of filters, and the MECA which will measure water vapour. You can read more about the Phoenix instruments at http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/science05.php. This programme, as all space programmes are, is massively collaborative. It is a partnership between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and other international contributors. Peter Smith from the University of Arizona is the Science Team lead. On the Canadian side the Science Team is composed of researchers from York University, Dalhousie University, University of Alberta, and the Geological Survey of Canada. The meteorological station was built by MDA (who also built the Canadarm), Optech and Passat. The launch this morning was quite a thrill. As someone else pointed out, the most challenging part is yet to come: the descent. The landing is very ambitious, with multiple stages including parachutes and retro-rockets. Good fun.

Re:North Pole?

[Ironsides]

The Marssian North Pole is in reference to the geographical north pole, not the magnetic. The Marssian magnetic field is so week as to be non existent.

Re:Why don't they send some probe to look for life

[Tablizer]

The problem is that detecting life remotely has proven a difficult task. It is hard to rule out soil chemistry, and we don't know enough about potential Martian microbes to target their signs. Even if there was life, tests may create the same kind of controversies that Viking did. Only microscopic views of life wiggling around would be definitative evidence, but that would be an expensive mission, especially if microbes are small and sparse. (The left-right test has promise, but even that is not definative.)