Phoenix makes picture-perfect Mars landing

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander survived a risky
plunge through the Red Planet's atmosphere and touched down in Mars'
northern polar region on Sunday, sending back pictures of a
bleak-looking, oddly patterned plain.

Over the next 90 days, the probe is due to dig into the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.
Cheers
swept through Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when
the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a
nail-biting descent. "Phoenix has landed! Phoenix has landed! Welcome
to the northern plains of Mars," deputy systems engineer Richard
Kornfeld announced.
The first data from the probe indicated that
it was sitting almost exactly level on its landing site in Mars'
Vastitas Borealis region.

“In my dreams it couldn’t have gone as perfectly as it went,” NASA project manager Barry Goldstein said. “It went right down the middle.”
Among
Phoenix’s first tasks were to check its power supply and the health of
its science instruments, and unfurl its solar panels after the dust
settled. Then the first pictures were taken and transmitted to Earth.
The pictures showed the fully deployed solar panels, the soil under one
of Phoenix's landing pads and long-range looks toward the horizon of
the northern plains.
The
plains appeared to broken up by polygon-shaped fractures — as expected,
based on orbital imagery. Scientists say such patterns arise in the
polar regions of Earth as well as Mars, due to wind action or repeated
cycles of freezing and thawing.
"Underneath
this surface, I guarantee, is ice," said Peter Smith, the Phoenix
mission's principal investigator from the University of Arizona at
Tucson.
Dan McCleese, a chief scientist at JPL, said the polygonal terrain was "absolutely beautiful."
"It looks like a good place to start digging," he said.

Seven minutes of terror
Phoenix
plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph (19,200
kilometers per hour) after a 10-month, 422 million-mile (675
million-kilometer) voyage through space. 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 (8 kph)
touchdown.
The
automated descent was dubbed "the seven minutes of terror" for good
reason. More than half of all nations’ attempts to land on Mars have
ended in failures.
Smith
said the room was thick with tension during those seven minutes. "I
couldn't let go of the chair," he said. "I had a grip on it".
Sunday's touchdown was 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.

Phoenix’s
landing was a relief for NASA, since Mars has a reputation for
swallowing spacecraft. More than half of all nations’ attempts to land
on Mars have failed.
NASA
Administrator Mike Griffin marveled at the precision of the Phoenix
team members' aim, saying they achieved better than "one part in 10
million of accuracy." Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the
science missions directorate, said that was the equivalent of hitting a
golf ball in Washington — to make a hole-in-one on a golf course in
Australia.
"And you have to remember, that hole is moving," JPL Director Charles Elachi quipped.


Taking in the arctic sights

Phoenix’s
target landing site was a 30-mile-wide (50-kilometer-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 (2.4-meter-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 an
environment warmer 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.

Avoided Polar Lander's doom

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 with 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.
This report includes information from The Associated Press and msnbc.com.