Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Included on the lander is a Canadian-built weather station.s -lander.html
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/04/mar
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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Here's what happened to the missing Mars Polar Lander: http://youtube.com/watch?v=x_iPvUWyzhE
- Heineken fanboi
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Puny humans! This one will go silent too! Not only you don't ask for permission to visit, but you also pollute our water supply with useless noisy junk!
This time, not even Tom Cruise will save you!
Eric: "What're quantum mechanics?"
Rincewind: "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose."
Thank you for explaining what a Phoenix is. I had always assumed it was the name of a web browser.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/04/tech/pri ntable3133675.shtml
Seriously, if you are going to link to an Associated Press article, please link to a version that doesn't require registration to read.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
There's already a video of the launch on youtube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0X1FoyLRGY
Good stuff. Someday I have to see a launch in person, it's got to be impressive
The first time my eyes skimmed this, I thought I read that it had landed. Bummer. Biggest trial is still yet to come, imo.
We have just published yesterday our comprehensive article/interview with NASA on the Phoenix - you can find it here: Phoenix interview
Likewise the AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missile, built on the technology developed for the AIM-47 which never went operational because the two aircraft it was designed for didn't either.
rj
Think how many people could have been fed with this money.
$420 million. Enough to buy every person in the US 1 apple. Just one.
Think how many people have been fed with this money. The operative word you're looking for is jobs. Go get one. You might like it.
The absence of a magnetic field on mars has some interesting consequences. Since Mars and Earth were formed from the same material, it is very surprising that Mars doesn't have oceans. One of the theories is that the solar wind of particles from the sun carried away the atmosphere, and so the oceans just evaporated away until it became so cold the remaining water froze into the polar ice caps. Recent estimates indicate that Mars loses some 100 tons of atmosphere every day. The Earth is protected from the solar wind by its magnetosphere, which results from the magnetic field. Mars's magnetic field, on the other hand, disappeared some 4 Billion years ago when the planet's core cooled off.
Dangit, do you have to be so pessmistic ?
Think about how many guns and bombs and other things that actively make peoples lifes miserable will not be bought with this money.
There, you can start cheering now. I'm all for space exploration because it takes money that would otherwise most likely be used for killing people.
The Scout missions are actually small, "lower-cost" missions. All of the instruments riding on Phoenix are tiny. Take, for example, the lidar (laser radar) system. On Earth these systems weigh many hundreds of kilograms. The one going to Mars weighs only 6.5 kg. Fitting a capable instrument into such a small package was no small task! One of the things that Phoenix will try to do is be the first to "taste the water". There are many indirect detections of water from radars, spectrometers and the like. Phoenix will actually try to scoop some ice up and will analyze it on-board. As far as we know, water is essential for life, and so this is a big step. The same instruments will also try to detect organic matter, which *is* a test for life (either past or present).
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.)
Table-ized A.I.
There is a fascinating story on the accidental discovery that Mars once had a magnetic field.
If Mars has no magnetic field what determines North?
Space exploration is risky business, and there have been about as many successful missions to Mars as failures. An account of the fate of each mission to Mars is given in the hilarious Mars Scorecard. Fortunately, all of the missions in the new millenium have been pretty successful, and so we are very hopeful for Phoenix.
With Mars, it seems that the arrival is a far more delicate maneuver, so we'll see what happens when it eventually gets there. Will this be another bull's eye? Splattttt!!! or a more dignified descent followed by the sounds of silence? or maybe, just maybe, it's going to work this time? More news in 9 months...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This animation from Maas Digital shows that the planned landing of Phoenix is very ambitious. As the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere it is protected by a heat shield. Notice the ice cap on the northern pole, which was constructed from images from the Mars Global Surveyor. A parachute will be used to slow the descent, but because the atmosphere is so thin, it will still be going *very* fast. You can see clouds in the background, which were also seen from orbit by MGS.
A key event happens after the parachute and heat shield rip away: the landing gear deploys, and then the retro-rockets kick in. One problem with the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander was that the sequence of the last two events was reversed. An on-board sensor felt a jolt as when the landing gear locked in and assumed that the landing had taken place. The engines were shut off and the spacecraft plummeted to ground. So close...
It is very difficult to test landing procedures here on Earth. The gravity on Mars is only a third of what we have, and a simulation is never as good as testing in realistic conditions.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Hmmm... I have a question: Let's say that theory is correct. Would it be possible to pick a decent sized crater on Mars, drop tons and tons and tons of breathable air in it, then artificially create a magnetic field around it to keep it from escaping?
Unfortunately, no. While a localized magnetic field might help to keep charged particles out, it wouldn't keep the atmosphere in. Some ideas to crate a breathable atmosphere include creating a biosphere dome and terraforming the planet, although a lot of technological development is still needed in both cases.
The summary mentions that the name is derived from the mythical phoenix, but this is only part of the story. The probe - the first to be launched as part of NASA's low cost "scout" program - was led by the University of Arizona. It's safe to guess that Phoenix also refers to the capital of the arid state. I wonder if I'm the only one who keeps confusing the leadership of this mission with the ubiquitous University of Phoenix.
For this and more information on the Phoenix mission, see the mission page.