Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mars Phoenix Probe Successfully Launched

Posted by Zonk on from the fly-little-birdie dept.

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.'"

6 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Canadian Content by zapwow · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Canadian Content by wigaloo · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Unwelcome visitors! by kiberovca · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."
  3. Re:Great. Just great. by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:North Pole? by wigaloo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Great. Just great. by Ihlosi · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Think how many people could have been fed with this money.



    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.