Phoenix Mars Spacecraft is About a Million Miles and a Day from Landing
This global image of Mars was taken by the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 on the Hubble Space Telescope. The north polar cap can be seen at the top, and the immense rift valley called Valles Marineris is visible in the lower left. (Image Credit: Philip James, University of Toledo; Steven Lee, University of Colorado; and NASA)
At current speed, Phoenix could complete the Indy 500 in 150 seconds.
As of noon today, the Phoenix spacecraft was just over a million miles and a day away from landing on the northern plains of Mars.
The spacecraft remains healthy and on target, team leaders from NASA Headquarters, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and The University of Arizona said at a news briefing held at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., today.
"The spacecraft is functioning really great," Phoenix mission manager Joe Guinn of JPL said.
Nevertheless, anxiety is rising because so much rides on a successful landing, and landing is risky, panelists said. Fewer than half of attempted Mars landings have succeeded.
"We bet the whole farm on a safe landing," Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the UA said. "We can't do our science without a safe landing, and that's cause for anxiety."
Smith paraphrased Ralph Waldo Emerson on why the risk is worth it: "To go where there is no path and leave a trail for others to follow. That's what Phoenix is doing."
Phoenix, which is the first mission led for NASA by a public university, will be the first mission to touch Martian water ice. Scientists hope to learn how water in Mars' atmosphere interacts with its subsurface ice, how Mars' climate changes through time, and the best locations for future missions to search for possible life.
Press briefing panelists Guinn, Smith, Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein and Doug McCuistion, director of Mars exploration for NASA, were about as calm as racehorses dancing into the starting gates today.
But they said they couldn't be more ready for tomorrow's dramatic seven-minute spacecraft entry, descent and landing. The scenario is that Phoenix enters Mars' atmosphere, reaches 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit during hypersonic flight through the atmosphere, deploys its parachute, jettisons its heat shield, deploys it landing legs, activates its radar, jettisons its parachute and fires its thrusters the last 18 seconds before landing.
"It's a very nerve-racking time, but our team has trained for five years to do this," Goldstein said.
Goldstein and Guinn said that a decision about whether to perform one more trajectory correction maneuver later tonight will be made by 5:30 this afternoon.
The dust cloud that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been tracking has already moved across the landing area and poses no hazard to the landing.
As of noon MST today, Phoenix had 1.28 million miles left to travel out of its 422-million-mile flight from Earth.
et cetera
- Extra Info |
The Phoenix mission is led by Smith of UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
For more about Phoenix, visit:
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
Google
MySpace
Propeller
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo