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Mars rover to make risky trip into crater

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- NASA's aging but durable Mars rover Opportunity will make what could be a trip of no return into a deep impact crater as it tries to peer further back than ever into the Red Planet's geologic history.

The descent into Victoria Crater received the go-ahead because the potential scientific returns are worth the risk that the solar-powered, six-wheel rover might not be able to climb out, NASA officials and scientists said Thursday.

The vehicle has been roaming Mars for nearly 3 ½ Earth years. Scientists and engineers want to send it in while it still appears healthy.

"This crater, Victoria, is a window back into the ancient environment of Mars," said Alan Stern, the NASA associate administrator who authorized the move.

"Entering this crater does come with some unknowns," Stern added. "We have analyzed the entry point but we can't be certain about the terrains and the footing down in the crater until we go there. We can't guarantee, although we think we are likely to come back out of the crater."

Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, have been exploring opposite sides of Mars since landing in January 2004, discovering geologic evidence of rocks altered by water from a long-ago wetter period of the now-dusty planet.

Blasted open by a meteor impact, Victoria Crater is a half-mile across and about 200 to 230 feet deep -- far deeper than anything else the rovers have explored.

"Because it's deeper it provides us access to just a much longer span of time," said Steve Squyres, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover mission from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He said it's not known just how much time is represented in the crater's layered walls.

Opportunity's first target will be a band of bright material like a bathtub ring about 10 feet below the crater's rim.

"That was the original, pre-impact surface so this bright stuff is the stuff that was in contact with the Martian atmosphere at the time Victoria formed, which may have been billions of years ago," Squyres said.

The initial entry is expected on July 7 or 9. To get into the crater, the rover will have to safely cross a ripple of wind-formed material at the lip of the crater, the kind of feature that has given it trouble before. The team plans to initially drive only far enough to have all six wheels on the slope and then back up to the top, to analyze how it performed.

"We call that a toe dip," said John Callas, the rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Since inception, the twin-rover mission has cost more than $900 million, and now costs $20 million to $24 million annually. Planned to last 90 days, the mission is in its fourth extension and another proposal would continue operations to the end of October 2008.

Those will be interesting pictures.....

So for the $900 million spent so far...what have we actually learned except a robot can move and take pictures? I could have told them that for nothing!

Well, I bet it takes temperature readings too,and considering it's an SUV, we can tell what the effect of 1 SUV on a planet is and see what we're doing, considering the thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions we have in this country.





Sorry about that, had to kick Al Gore off of my computer.

The thing I would like to know is IF they come out with a finding that there was in fact life on Mars millions of years ago...what will they do with that information?

Quoted from bumblethru

The thing I would like to know is IF they come out with a finding that there was in fact life on Mars millions of years ago...what will they do with that information?

Send some stem cells up there to 'do their thing'.....

Perhaps they will find that there was life on Mars at one time and that due to a cosmic blast, they had to leave and came to earth to re-populate. And that must be where our politicians came from...don't ya think? (it would make for a good movie that maybe Tom Cruise could be in)

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Phoenix spacecraft heads toward Mars
Water on Red Planet to be sampled
BY JOHN JOHNSON JR. Los Angeles Times

   NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft launched Saturday morning from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a 10-month journey to the north pole of Mars, where it is expected to be the fi rst craft to sample the water of another planet.
   The Delta II rocket carrying the 7-foot-tall lander lifted off at 5:26 a.m. on a scheduled 423-millionmile journey that should deliver Phoenix to the Martian surface on May 25.
   “Today’s launch is the first step in the long journey to the surface of Mars,” said Peter Smith, a University of Arizona astronomer who is the lead scientist on the mission.
   “We certainly are excited about launching, but we are still concerned about our actual landing, the most difficult step of this mission,” Smith said.
   The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a mixed record with Mars missions. Its twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been a resounding success, still going strong after four years on the surface. But the last mission to the polar region, Mars Polar Lander, was lost on arrival in 1999.
   If this mission unfolds as planned, the lander will parachute to the Red Planet’s surface, using its descent engines to further slow itself to about 5 mph. Once on the ground, it will unfurl its power-generating solar panels and extend its 7.7-footlong robotic digging arm, the key component of the $420-million mission.
   A scoop attached to the arm will dig down to a layer of ice — thought to lie within 3 feet of the surface — that the Mars Odyssey spacecraft detected from orbit. A drill-like tool was added to the scoop after scientists realized that the ice on Mars could be much harder — more like cement — than ice on Earth.
   Samples of soil and ice collected by the robotic arm will be transferred to a set of instruments onboard for analysis. Phoenix carries eight tiny ovens that will be used to heat the soil and water samples, searching for organic compounds that could indicate past or present biological processes. Each oven will be used only once to avoid contamination.
   NASA has tried to keep expectations low, insisting that Phoenix is not searching for life, merely trying to understand the water story.
   “Water is central to every type of study we will conduct on Mars,” Smith said.
   NASA learned to manage expectations with the Viking missions in 1976. The public, its appetite whetted by generations of science fi ction writers envisioning Martians plying canals like Venice boatmen, waited excitedly for news of the discovery of life, only to have the spacecraft report a sterile, lifeless world.
   That disappointment haunted the Mars program for decades. Only in recent years, after the discovery of large subterranean deposits of ice and tantalizing evidence of surface flows today, has there been renewed interest in Mars.
   Some scientists now believe that Viking either was searching in the wrong place or wasn’t equipped to look for the right clues.
   Even the optimists acknowledge that Mars is, and possibly always has been, too hostile for complex life forms. They no longer rule out the possibility that some rudimentary forms of life could once have existed and still might, possibly in some watery underground environment heated by the planet’s interior.
   In contrast to Earth and Venus, with their substantial internal sources of heat-causing volcanic activity, Mars’ volcanoes appear to be long dead, a kind of “warm corpse,” researchers say.
   Scientists believe that Mars has gone through three ages, starting with the Noachian, which covered the first billion years, the most livable era, when the planet might have had a much warmer surface with running streams and possibly rain. The Hesperian era came next, a 500-million-year period when geologic activity slowed and water pooled underground.
   The current period is the Amazonian, a 2-billion-year era during which the surface became desiccated and the atmosphere grew thin.
   Scientists hope that scientific instruments aboard Phoenix will fill out the story.
   Just as with air travel, it is the launch and landing that are the danger points in a space mission. Phoenix’s landing site is on an arctic plain called Vastitas Borealis that is similar in most respects to central Greenland or northern Alaska.
   The craft is expected to touch down in a shallow valley 30 miles wide and 800 feet deep. The site was chosen after an early favorite turned out to be covered with large rocks. (If one of the lander’s three legs came to rest on one, it could tip precariously.)

This artist’s rendering released by NASA shows the Phoenix Mars Lander on the surface of Mars. The spacecraft was launched on Saturday aboard an unmanned rocket and will arrive at Mars in 2008

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Rover begins exploring crater
BY AMBER DANCE AND JOHN JOHNSON JR.
Los Angeles Times

   After surviving the harshest dust storm in its nearly four-year trek on Mars, the rover Opportunity returned to work last week, dipping its toe into 260-foot-deep Victoria Crater.
   Opportunity rolled its six wheels about 10 feet into the crater, then backed out in a maneuver its handlers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., dubbed “the hokeypokey.”
   As it backed out, Opportunity slipped on a sandy ripple at the crater’s edge and halted, said rover project manager John Callas. Engineers planned to adjust Opportunity’s settings to handle the slippage before going back into the crater to explore.
   “We want to understand the conditions,” Callas said. “We want to make sure we can get back out.”
   The crater exploration is risky. If the rover malfunctions, or the terrain is more difficult than expected, this could be Opportunity’s last trip. Rover managers decided to make the trip after determining the rewards outweighed the risks.
   “For almost two years now, we’ve felt that Victoria Crater was the most compelling science for Opportunity,” Callas said.
   Opportunity spent months surveying the crater, the largest it has encountered since the rover and its twin, Spirit, landed on the Martian surface in January 2004. After reaching Victoria Crater last September, the rover trundled along the rim, taking pictures and looking for a good entry site.
   After traversing a quarter of the crater perimeter, scientists decided to return Opportunity to the spot it examined first, a gently sloping region known as Duck Bay.
   Victoria Crater formed billions of years ago when a meteorite smashed into the planet. In the crater’s walls, researchers expect to find layered strata similar to the rock layers in the Grand Canyon. Each layer represents an era of Martian history.
   The rover team is particularly interested in something called “the bathtub ring,” a layer of strata part way down that Callas said may represent the ancient surface of Mars.
   Farther down, scientists hope to uncover more “blueberries,” marble-like outcrops that formed from ancient water flows when the surface of Mars was a wetter place than today’s desiccated landscape.
   Callas said the science team does not intend to send Opportunity to the bottom of the crater. It’s filled with a layer of fine sand that could trap the rover.
   Besides the long search for an entry point, Opportunity’s descent was delayed by the most intense dust storm either rover has encountered. Opportunity and Spirit are solar-powered, so they must shut down during inclement weather.
   Originally intended to last three months, the rover missions are now approaching their fourth anniversary. Opportunity has trekked seven miles across the dusty surface of the Red Planet.
   Spirit, though hobbled and dragging one inoperative wheel, is also back on the job on the other side of the planet, investigating a geologic feature called Home Plate.
   Callas expects Opportunity to spend a few months in Victoria Crater. But he’s already eyeing future targets, such as a set of loose rocks, called cobbles, that may be meteorites or material that flew out of the crater when the meteorite hit.  

  
  
  

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‘Souped-up’ rover awaits its turn for big Mars mission
BY JOHN JOHNSON JR. Los Angeles Times

    Wider than a Hummer, tall enough to roll over big boulders and toting a laser “ray gun” that can zap rocks at 30 feet, NASA’s next-generation Mars rover looks like something you’d paint a skull and crossbones on and enter in a demolition derby.
    Compared to Sojourner, the dowdy little robot that tooled around on Mars for three months in 1997, the atomic-powered Mars Science Laboratory rover being built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., is an inter-planetary beast.
    “Nothing like this has ever been sent to Mars before,” said Joy Crisp, 49, deputy project scientist for the new mission.
    But then, this new rover has a big job: settling once and for all whether the conditions on ancient Mars were suitable for life.
    With a full complement of the most sophisticated instruments in NASA’s tool chest, and the capability to drive over obstacles that deterred earlier rovers, MSL will strip away billions of years of Martian history to reveal its watery childhood, and possibly, evidence of any microbes that swam in those ancient seas.
    The challenge is getting it there — and getting there on time. Landing an oversized rover on a far-off planet, while facing a drop-dead launch date in the fall of 2009, is daunting enough to worry even experienced engineers.
    “This is a study in managed paranoia,” said Adam Steltzner, 44, who heads the 25-member team responsible for the landing . phase of the mission.
    Because the rover is so large, it can’t be bundled up in airbags that bounce along the surface before opening, as was done with the current rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Instead, Steltzner and his team have come up with a different landing system.
    Like lowering a piano from an upper floor apartment, MSL will be dropped on ropes from a hovering spacecraft, called a sky crane.
    “Our system looks crazy,” Steltzner said. “But it’s intrinsically safe.”
FINDING HARSH WASTELAND
    Fascination with Mars’ ability to support life goes back hundreds of years to the time when early astronomers imagined alien boatmen plying its canals. So, excitement was high when the twin Viking missions landed on the planet in 1976.
    No signs of life were found. “Self-sterilizing” is the term scientists used to describe a place that appeared more barren than the harshest wastelands on Earth.
    The disappointment set back Mars research for a generation. NASA didn’t return until the 1990s, when it began trying to unravel the planet’s geology and history with new and more sophisticated instruments.
    Sojourner came first, clearing the way for Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004.
    The two rovers carry several spectrometers and a RAT — or rock abrasion tool — which they’ve used to analyze the mineral makeup of Martian rocks. The rovers’ marquee discovery was that a shallow sea once covered portions of the planet’s surface.
    The next craft to visit Mars will be NASA’s Phoenix lander, which is scheduled to touch down near the north pole this summer to analyze the large quantities of ice that have been detected just beneath the planet’s surface.
ROLLING OVER OBSTACLES
    But the most ambitious mission is MSL, which has the broadest possible mandate: to find out whether Mars ever was, or might still be, habitable for rudimentary life forms.
    It also will characterize the potential for human settlement, on the assumption that future presidents will carry through on President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to Mars later this century.
    Doing all this requires what Crisp called a “souped-up rover.”
    On first glance, MSL has the vaguely insect-like look of Spirit and Opportunity: a flat, spiderlike body with a mast at the front containing cameras to help the rover plot its course.
    But there are important differences. The 43-inch-high main deck, where the instruments are found, will allow MSL to roll right over rocks that would frustrate Spirit and Opportunity.
    Solar panels cover the decks of the smaller rovers. But MSL needs more power for its hungry instrument package than the sun can deliver, particularly in winter, when the sun is little more than a bright dot on the Martian horizon.
    MSL is taking its power source with it, in the form of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The RTG carries 10.6 pounds of plutonium dioxide, which produces heat that is converted into electricity. The mission is scheduled to last one Martian year, which is equal to about two Earth years, although the RTG will be able to supply power for many years longer.
    Like Spirit and Opportunity, MSL carries a drill to bore into interesting rocks. But unlike the smaller rovers, MSL will capture the powder from the drill holes and send them to two onboard instruments for chemical analysis.
    The CheMin instrument will bombard the powder with X-rays to uncover the mineral composition. An instrument called SAM, for sample analysis at Mars, will cook the powder, looking for organic compounds, which boil off at low temperatures.
    Those compounds include carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur, the essential building blocks of life.
    MSL will also try to identify the effects of biological processes, such as grains in the rocks that could have been made by bacteria.
    Spirit and Opportunity spent a lot of time grinding holes in rocks that turned out to be not that interesting. MSL can short-circuit that time-consuming process with a highintensity laser, which can vaporize a spot on the surface from a distance of 30 feet. The closest thing to a scifi-style ray gun, the target will give off a gaseous plasma that an instrument called the ChemCam can quickly scan before deciding whether to go in for a closer look.
    If there ever was a living creature on Mars, ChemCam, CheMin and SAM will have the best chance yet of finding its chemical signature, according to the scientific team.
    “This is the most capable payload we’ve ever sent anywhere,” said mission manager Mike Watkins.
    But landing it on another planet is terrifying, said Steltzner, whose team also programmed the landings of Spirit and Opportunity. The proposed sky crane is fraught with opportunities to damage or destroy the rover, Steltzner said. “I spend quite a few hours every day thinking about it.”
TIME AND COST WORRIES
    Getting the landing right isn’t the only problem facing the JPL team. There’s some concern about getting the mission ready in time for the planned launch, scheduled between Sept. 15 and Oct. 8, 2009. If the launch team misses that, it will be two years before the planets align for another attempt.
    Cost is another worry. At $1.8 billion, MSL’s mission cost amounts to about 10 percent of the agency’s annual budget.
    All that money has brought high expectations — and plenty of anxiety from Washington. Last fall, NASA ordered JPL to remove some of the rover’s instrumentation to save money. The heat shield also had to be redesigned, running up costs some more.
    Green said NASA remains committed to the project.
    “We had to compromise on some things,” said Watkins. “But we still have a fantastic mission.”

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Robotic digger set for landing on Mars
NASA nervous in wake of prior failures
BY ALICIA CHANG The Associated Press

    LOS ANGELES — Like a miner prospecting for gold, NASA hopes its latest robot to Mars hits pay dirt when it lands Sunday near the red planet’s north pole to conduct a 90-day digging mission.
    The three-legged Phoenix Mars lander fitted with a backhoe arm is zeroing in on the unexplored arctic region where a reservoir of ice is believed to lie beneath the surface.
    Phoenix lacks the tools to detect signs of alien life — either now or in the past. However, it will study whether the ice ever melted and look for traces of organic compounds in the permafrost to determine if life could have emerged at the site.
    Before this robotic geologist can excavate the soil, it must first survive a nail-biting plunge through the Martian atmosphere. Despite the rousing success of NASA’s twin Mars rovers, which landed in 2004, more than half of the world’s attempts to land on the planet have failed.
    “It’s kind of like first-day jitters,” said Ed Sedivy, program manager at Lockheed Martin Corp., which built Phoenix. “There’s a lot of excitement, but there’s also some nervousness.”
    Launched last summer from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Phoenix has traveled 422 million miles for Sunday’s touchdown.
    The spacecraft’s main tool is an 8-foot aluminum-and-titanium robotic arm capable of digging trenches 2 feet deep. Once ice is exposed — believed to be anywhere from a few inches to a foot deep — the lander will use a powered drill bit at the end of the arm to break it up.
    “It’ll be a construction zone,” said mission co-leader Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. He predicts the ice will be “as hard as a sidewalk.”
    The excavated soil and ice bits will then be brought aboard Phoenix’s science lab. It will be baked in miniature ovens and the vapors analyzed for organic compounds, the chemical building blocks of life.
    The last time NASA did tests for organics it was on a hunt for extraterrestrial life in 1976 with the twin Viking spacecraft. No conclusive signs of life were found.
    On this mission, Phoenix will also probe whether the underground ice ever melted during a time when Mars was warmer and wetter. If Phoenix finds salt or sand deposits, it might be evidence of past flowing water.
    Phoenix’s landing target — a broad shallow valley in the high northern latitudes comparable to Greenland or northern Alaska on Earth — was chosen because if organic compounds existed, they’re more likely to have been preserved in ice. Researchers do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the site because it’s too cold.
    “The polar region is a great preserver,” said principal scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Just as in your kitchen you preserve your food in the freezer, so the planet preserves organic materials and the history of life … inside of the ice.”
    On Sunday, Phoenix will punch through the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph. Over the next seven minutes, it will use the atmosphere’s friction and a parachute to slow to 5 mph. Seconds before touchdown, Phoenix will fi re its thrusters for what scientists hope will be a soft landing. If all goes well, ground controllers expect to hear a signal at 7:53 p.m. EDT.
    Smith calls the entry the “seven minutes of terror.”
    “Try holding your breath for seven minutes,” he said. “It’s plenty of time to get very nervous.”
    The last time NASA tried a soft landing on Mars, it ended in disaster. In 1999, the Mars Polar Lander was angling for the south pole when it prematurely shut off its engine and tumbled to its destruction.
    The loss, coupled with the earlier failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter during NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” era, forced the space agency to scrap another lander and restructure its Mars exploration program.
    Phoenix, named after the mythological bird that rose from its own ashes, was cobbled together from the mothballed lander mission in the wake of the back-to-back failures.
    Barry Goldstein, project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said engineers extensively tested Phoenix’s systems and instruments to minimize risk of failure.
    “Since we inherited a lot of hardware, we spent a lot of effort in testing this vehicle and understanding how it works,” Goldstein said.
    If successful, Phoenix would join the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity on the Martian surface. Together, the rovers have traveled more than 10 miles in their four years exploring opposite sides of the equator. They have uncovered geologic evidence that water once flowed at or near the surface of ancient Mars.
    Unlike the six-wheeled rovers, Phoenix will stay in one spot. The cost of the mission is $420 million.

NASA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An artist’s rendering depicts the Phoenix lander on the arctic plains of Mars just as it has begun to dig a trench through the upper layer of soil.

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Mars Lander ready to touch down today
BY ALICIA CHANG The Associated Press

    PASADENA, Calif. — After a nearly 10-month journey, a NASA spacecraft will land softly today on the northern polar region of Mars, if all goes as planned.
    The Phoenix Mars Lander is set to touch down in a broad, shallow valley in the Martian arctic plains believed to hold a vast supply of underground ice. Phoenix’s job during the 90-day mission is to excavate the soil and ice to study whether the site could have supported microbial life.
    The stakes are especially high: Fewer than half of the world’s attempts to land on the Red Planet have succeeded.
    “I’m getting a real case of heebie-jeebies,” Joe Guinn, mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on the eve of the landing.
    In keeping with tradition, JPL project manager Barry Goldstein plans to hand out bags of peanuts — both salted and unsalted — to his team members on landing day. Over the years, JPL found that missions with the lucky charms have better success than those without.
    “I don’t tempt fate,” Goldstein said during a tour of mission control.
    Phoenix is the first to attempt to land in Mars’ high northern latitudes. The lander will rely on its heat shield, parachute and a dozen thrusters to slow itself down from 12,000 mph to 5 mph. The risky descent takes about seven minutes.
    NASA has not had a successful powered landing in more than 30 years since the twin Viking landers in 1976. The last time NASA tried was in 1999 when the Mars Polar Lander prematurely cut off its engines and crashed into the south pole. The Polar Lander loss came during a communications blackout.
    Phoenix, on the other hand, will be closely watched by a flotilla of Mars orbiters hovering overhead that will relay information to Earth.
    The weather looks ideal for landing, said Peter Smith, principal investigator of the University of Arizona, Tucson, which leads the $420 million mission.
    A dust cloud swept through the target site several days ago, but it did not linger and should not affect the spacecraft, Smith said.
    If successful, Phoenix will join two other spacecraft on the Martian surface — the rovers Spirit and Opportunity — which landed in 2004 and have been exploring opposite sides of the equatorial plains.

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NASA Spacecraft Makes Historic Landing on Mars
Monday , May 26, 2008

PASADENA, California —

A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.
Less than two hours later, the Phoenix Mars Lander beamed back four dozen black-and-white images including one of its foot sitting on Martian soil amid tiny rocks. Others included the horizon of the arctic plain and ground with polygon patterns similar to what can be found in Earth's permafrost regions.

• Click here to watch NASA's live video stream.

"Absolutely beautiful," said Dan McCleese, a chief scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It looks like a good place to start digging."

Cheers swept through mission control when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another.

• Click here for computer animation of the Phoenix lander's takeoff, journey, descent and landing.

"In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly as it went," project manager Barry Goldstein said. "It went right down the middle."

The initial pictures were primarily to give engineers information on the condition of the lander including its power supply and the health of its science instruments. An image showed the lander unfurled its solar panels as planned after the dust settled.

Initial results show Phoenix landed almost level, tilted at a quarter of a degree.

"The hardest part is over. There's still a lot of drama left," said Goldstein, who kept up a JPL tradition by passing out bowls of lucky peanuts during the landing.

• Click here for video of Phoenix's history and risky descent.

Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph after a 10-month, 422 million-mile voyage through space. The lander kept in contact with Earth through the orbiting Mars Odyssey during the entire "seven minutes of terror."

It performed a choreographed dance that included unfurling its parachute, shedding its heat shield and backshell, and firing thrusters to slow to a 5 mph touchdown. The radio signal confirming the landing came at 4:53 p.m. PDT.

• Click here for a detailed, minute-by-minute account of Phoenix's landing day.

"Touchdown detected!! We're on the surface of Mars and there is celebration in Mission Control!!" JPL engineer Brent Shockley blogged from inside mission control.

It's the first successful soft landing on Mars since the twin Viking landers touched down in 1976. NASA's twin rovers, which successfully landed on Mars four years ago, used a combination of parachutes and cushioned air bags to bounce to the surface.

Mission chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, had two words to describe the landing: "Picture perfect."

Phoenix's landing is a relief for NASA since Mars has a reputation of swallowing spacecraft. More than half of all nations' attempts to land on Mars have failed.

Phoenix's target landing site was 30-mile-wide shallow valley in the high northern latitudes similar in location to Earth's Greenland or northern Alaska. The site was chosen because images from space spied evidence of a reservoir of frozen water close to the surface.

Like a tourist in a foreign country, the lander initially will take in the sights during its first week on the Red Planet. It will talk with ground controllers through two Mars orbiters, which will relay data and images.

Phoenix is equipped with an 8-foot-long arm capable of digging trenches in the soil to get to ice that is believed to be buried inches to a foot deep. Then it will analyze the dirt and ice samples for traces of organic compounds, the chemical building blocks of life.

The lander also will study whether the ice ever melted at some point in Mars' history when the planet had a warmer environment than the current harsh, cold one it currently has.

Scientists do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the Phoenix landing site because it's too frigid. But they say that if raw ingredients of life exist anywhere on the planet, they likely would be preserved in the ice.

Phoenix, however, cannot detect signs of alien life that may exist now or once existed.

The only other time NASA searched for chemical signs of life was during the Viking missions. Neither lander found conclusive evidence of life.

Phoenix avoided the doom of its sister spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, which in 1999 crashed into the south pole after prematurely cutting off its engines. The Polar Lander loss, along with the earlier loss of an orbiter the same year, forced NASA to overhaul its Mars exploration program.

Phoenix, named after the mythical bird that is reborn from its ashes, inherited hardware from a lander mission that was scrapped after the back-to-back Mars losses, and carries similar instruments that flew on Polar Lander.

Built by Lockheed Martin Corp., Phoenix is the first mission from NASA's Scout program, a lower-cost complement to the space agency's pricier Mars missions. It cost $420 million to develop and launch Phoenix compared to the $820 million originally invested in the twin rovers.

The rovers have dazzled scientists with their Energizer Bunny-like ability to keep going and their geologic findings that ancient Mars once had water that flowed at or near the surface.

Mission managers do not expect Phoenix to be as hardy as the rovers since winter will set in later this year at the landing site with fewer hours of sunlight available each day to power the lander's solar panels.

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Mars mission a case of misplaced priorities

Re May 26 article about NASA’s Mars landing. [The article, which states] “the landing [was an] elegant feat of engineering and artistry” again emphasizes the lack of fiscal priorities and vacuum of leadership in Washington. Other stories in the same edition comment on hardships caused by high gas and food prices, which are contributing to home foreclosures and poverty throughout the country.
    This letter isn’t advocating we abandon the space program, but to prioritize our needs. When one considers the expenditures over the last 40 years and compares that lack of funding for alternate energy development, how much financial suffering and poverty could have been averted if alternate energy had been developed comparable to space accomplishments? Much more direct benefits would have accrued to the people.
    Another factor contributing to our fi scal woes by our president and Congress is the tremendous cost of the Iraq war debacle — in lives lost, soldiers maimed and billions of dollars lost.
    Washington hacks have to wake up and realize we can’t continue to send young men and women to Iraq, [Europe], Okinawa, Korea and other places throughout the world and maintain Medicare, Social Security and other social programs and foreign aid before these deficits make us a second-class nation.
    CHARLES W. SCANNELL
    Northville