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Space Science

Phoenix Mars Polar Lander Website Launched 134

Posted by michael from the drilling-for-oil dept.
ciph3r writes "The Phoenix Mars Polar Lander mission has just launched their public website. '[The] mission is to land in the northern polar region of Mars (about 70 N latitude) in May 2008 and to expose the upper few feet of surface material using a robotic arm to find the ice that was discovered by the Odyssey mission in 2002. The history of this ice and its interaction with the martian atmosphere will be studied throughout the 3-month primary mission. This ice-rich soil may be one of the few habitable environments on Mars where a biological system can survive.'"
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Phoenix Mars Polar Lander Website Launched More

Phoenix Mars Polar Lander Website Launched

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  • Phoenix, Mars? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nah! Phoenix is in Arizona. Sure, Sedona is famous for its red rocks, but it's not Mars!
    • "Nah! Phoenix is in Arizona. Sure, Sedona is famous for its red rocks, but it's not Mars!"

      There's something ironic about naming a probe sent to one of the coldest visitable places in the solar system after one of the hottest inhabited places...
      • The Phoenix was a mythological bird that rose from the ashes of the fire that killed it. I bet they meant that this project is a Phoenix in that it rises from the ashes of the failed Mars Polar Lander.
        • Yes, yes I know. Living in the city makes it really bloody hard to not know at least a few things about it, like that the dude who influenced naming of Phoenix, Kyrene, and Tempe was a rich British weirdo who actually tried to put his classical education to use by mis-naming or oddly naming lots of things here...
        • Phoenix was also the tutor of Achilles. Does this mean they're going to make this sucker wear armored high-top sboes this time?
    • Yes, but the funny thing is that much of this mission is being done by the University of Arizona... in Tuscon.

  • The Mission Logo (Score:5, Funny)

    by nxtr ( 813179 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @07:35PM (#11376174)
    It looks like they took the Twirl filter to the Firefox logo in Photoshop.

  • The logo... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by christopherfinke ( 608750 ) <chris@efinke.com> on Saturday January 15, 2005 @07:37PM (#11376187) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know why the "o" in the Phoenix logo [arizona.edu] is the symbol for male? Also, what does the year 2007 have to do with anything?

  • Life on Mars - from Earth (Score:3, Interesting)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @07:39PM (#11376197) Homepage Journal
    I hope they are taking some precautions to reduce the terestrial contamination of regions of Mars where we expect there is the posibility of sustaining life. Because if we land something where there is frozen water, we could very well seed it with micro-organisms from Earth.
    • How do you know if that's not how life spreads? For all I know, the single cell bacteria that spawned us came from Mars, in which case we're just returning the favor.
      • "For all I know, the single cell bacteria that spawned us came from Mars..."

        Perfectly possible, but we would still want to see how it had evolved independently from Earth before we contaminated it.
      • On the other hand, if we spread the life around right away, we lose the opportunity to determine what it was like before there was life there. So even if we decide we do want to pass terrestrial life on to Mars, which is unlikely, it seems like a good idea to delay it until we've learned more about it as it is now. There's no rush, a few years of exploration is nothing compared to 4.5 billion of evolution or even the 6000 years estimated to have passed since the Biblical account of creation. In any event, I
    • I'd like to see the micro-organisms that can survive a year or more in space. The probes are as sterile as they can possibly be, by the time they get there. That big yellow thing up there in the sky is a nuclear reaction...
      • " is a nuclear reaction."

        OK, but then the organism has a good supply of energy that means. I'm sure if we could design something to operate in space, then so can nature.
      • Details here [nasa.gov].

        To summarise, some bacteria survived inside an unmanned probe NASA sent to the moon, which was then retrieved by the Apollo over two years later. It should be noted that the bacteria remained dormant through this period.

      • I'd like to see the micro-organisms that can survive a year or more in space. The probes are as sterile as they can possibly be, by the time they get there. That big yellow thing up there in the sky is a nuclear reaction...

        Sorry, but no. In November 1969, Apollo 12 landed with walking distance of the long-dead, unmanned Surveyor 3, which had touchded down three and a half years earlier. One of the objectives of Apollo 12 was to recover parts of the Surveyor to examine the effects of long term exposure to

      • The possibility of primitive life traveling through space in a theory called 'panspermia'. Though it's quite a stretch to consider viruses a form of life, it is known that some of them can survive some time in interplanetary space.

        There is some evidence that genetic material rains down on the earth a lot, and that some of it may cause infectious diseases...though that is just a bit too wierd for me take take seriously (at this point).
    • Don't worry -they are. I helped out at my university(of Copenhagen) when they were shipping out the magnet experiments for the Exploration Rovers, and I can tell you the decontamination regulations are almost anal-retentive. Basically, anything that goes into flight assembly is completely sterilized, exactly because of the risk of 'forward contamination'. There was, however, an incident where a baby rattlesnake had gotten itself into a computer box that by accident was placed in the clean room. That ought

  • about time? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mattthateeguy ( 850214 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @07:40PM (#11376204)
    I was wondering when they were going to send (another) spacecraft to Mars. I mean our current one(s) have been there for only 11 months.
    • Next one [nasa.gov] is going up august 10 this year, actually. Not a lander though, this time it's a very capable orbiter with a) lots of new new and better instruments, and b) enormously increased bandwidth to send data back to Earth.
  • Using "launched" to describe the introduction of a website for an interstellar mission. Gosh, they're getting their value for the minimum wage employees...
    • A bad pun in this case perhaps, but "launched" is commonly used when announcing that a new product or service has been created and released.

      For once, I think you're being just a little hard on Michael (never thought I'd say that...)

  • Locations of ice? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hazee ( 728152 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @07:51PM (#11376244)
    The European Mars Express probe has a radar boom that was meant to do really accurate measuring of the subsurface ice. This sounds like the sort of knowledge that would be really useful to have in deciding exactly where to aim the Phoenix mission.

    But they delayed unfolding the radar boom on Mars Express after some analysis showed that the forces released in springing it open might be enough to mess up the whole spacecraft.

    First it was meant to happen in April 2004, then delayed till June I think. After that I can't find any furthur information. Anyone know what the score with that is?
    • I guess they've got 3 more years until they need to have that data if they're going to use it, assuming they can upload final landing data at whenever the last chance is for the lander to determine it's LZ. I have looked at the mission profile, so I don't know if it calls for it to enter orbit, then land, or just come straight in. I imagine the Mars Express team probably wants to get as much other science done as possible before they risk putting it into an uncontrollable spin or whatever the concern is, so
      • It costs too much fuel to slow the spacecraft down sufficiently to allow it enter orbit before landing- it's just not feasible. Phoenix will be entering directly.
      • Regarding the delay of the Marsis boom deployment on Mars Express- it's delayed indefinitely at this time. The MEX engineers are currently planning to be sure it completes its prime mission before risking the deployment.

        Phoenix is rather depending on detailed photos sent back from the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, set to launch in August, for landing site selection.

      • Actually, one of Mars Global Surveyor's solar panels actually moved past its designed stop point during the aerobraking phase of the mission. (MGS was initially in an elliptical orbit and would dip into Mars's upper atmosphere on close approaches to slow itself down to circularize the orbit.) The solution was to modify the aerobraking procedure to lower the pressure on the solar panel which did work by delayed the planned mission profile aby a year.

        Details here [nasa.gov].

  • I hope they send up a decent microscope this time. The one on the mars rovers are only something like 30x power; the microscopes you can buy at toys are us can go up to at least 900x, and I've even seen a 1200x one there. You'd think that with that many millions spent on the project we could get something out there that could actually *see* a microbe if there was one.
    • Most light microscopes used for any sensible purpose are illuminating a thin-slice object prepared on a glass plate from underneath, going into the lense system. This is not that easy to do in space, with robotics. Instead, we would probably just have a nice camera with good optical zoom looking at a target. That's something quite different, and I guess it's one reason why higher resolution might be harder. You also have to remember that if these microbes are as small as the smallest archeas on Earth (or as
    • The mission is all about the science, so you pick your instruments accordingly. The microscope is for geology, not biology. They want to know the structure of the rocks.

      Why do you think a geologist would put a microscope better suited for biology on the rover? It doesn't make any sense.
      • ehhh, why not combine the science and increase its results, surely the better the magnification the better the results, cant be too skimpy, these scientists are too relaxed easy going types, no risks, no big ambitions, just little steps. Compared to the 60s, today is like, another day at the office, not the next frontier.
        • The higher the magnification, the smaller the field of view. Higher magnifications also require more specialized lighting and sample preparation, more precision parts, and a cleaner, more controlled environment. It's of little use for geology if you can't even see an entire grain of sand, and if vibration, vacuum, temperature changes and dust screw up the works so you can't see anything. It'd have to be a completely different microscope.
  • This mission bears a striking resemblance to the unsuccessful 1998 Mars Polar Lander [nasa.gov]. The Scout program is designed to identify and choose the most promising mission ideas. I am assuming that it was coincidence that the winner was a mirror to NASA's very own MPL. I'd like to think there were no other ideas (Mars Glider, etc) that should have won but didn't because this mission resembled NASA's baby.

    • Yes it does... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RKBA ( 622932 )
      Yes it does bear a striking resemblence to the 1998 Mars Polar Lander mission. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the Scout isn't just a rebuild of it - hopefully with the landing gear problem fixed. ;-)

      I always thought that not reusing the design and development work that went into the 1998 Mars Polar Lander is an example of NASA waste. Just because the landing gear failed to function properly is no reason to discard all the design and development time and effort that people (including myself - I spent ab
      • Right, seems like they could build another lander relatively cheaply. Even getting a ride into space would be too bad. They could team up with another mission going to mars, and offer to split the cab fare for the larger booster needed to send two spacecraft to mars.

      • Re:Yes it does... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by QuickFox ( 311231 )
        Design and development is the major cost of spacecraft,

        Why don't they send three nearly identical copies of the same lander (re-using the same design and development effort), and have them land close enough to communicate directly with each other by radio? Then if one lander loses the ability to communicate with the orbiters or with Earth, or even two of them lose it, the third can relay their data. If something goes wrong on a lander, debugging should become far easier if you can still communicate with t
    • Actually, here's the story. The Mars Polar Lander program produced two articles. One was launched in '98, and crashed. The other was scheduled to be launched in '01, but after the crash was shelved. This Phoenix mission basically stuck new instruments on the old frame, fixed the problem on the old one, and used it. It's a very ingenious solution.
    • From a strictly scientific point of view, it doesn't appear that a glider would be very useful. It would be a great engineering project, and definitely a cool project, but it wouldn't yield much (comparatively) in the way of science.
    • The budget for the Scout program was so tight that it would have been almost impossible to meet the criteria. Then Peter Smith suggested that they simply haul from storage and modify the existing backup MPL probe.
      This means saving a shitload of money on development(that's your tax dollars). So, not a coincidence, just numbers.
      I seriously doubt that a project like Glider would be able to fit within the limits and still have an acceptable chance of success.

  • Another polar lander, eh? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SeaDour ( 704727 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @07:57PM (#11376267) Homepage
    Let's hope it doesn't mysteriously disappear like the last one we tried sending [wikipedia.org].
  • They should add an applet that lets you control the camera on the space craft! Just think of the media exposure NASA would get!

  • Mars Scout (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mukaikubo ( 724906 ) <gtg430b.prism@gatech@edu> on Saturday January 15, 2005 @08:15PM (#11376349) Journal
    This is part of the Mars Scout Program, which is a really neat idea. Basically, every four years, NASA sends out a request for proposals, that basically says "You've got $N amount of money. Draw up a mission you can do for that price that'll give us some useful science." It's a cheap way of getting specific science results, as opposed to billion-dollar class megaprobes. The Phoenix won because it reused existing hardware, the Mars Polar Lander. Because of that, their mission became cheaper, so they could do more stuff within the price tag. The runner up, a Mars Airplane, is something I'd like to have seen- hopefully they pick it for the 2011 Mars Scout.

  • Mars Polar Lander Changes Name (Score:4, Funny)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Saturday January 15, 2005 @08:17PM (#11376358) Homepage
    After being sued by the company which makes the Phoenix BIOS, getting heckled by the Firebird project, and not being able to afford to take out an ad in the New York times proclaiming itself FireFox, has settled upon CowPoop.
  • I think the logo was done by the guy that used to do all the Led Zeppelin album covers.

  • With the spectacular success of the Mars Spirit and Opportunity missions and the pending 2009 launch of a nuclear powered Mars rover, sending a stationary lander would be quite a step backwards. If a lander lands in a locally boring spot it is stuck. If a rover lands in a dull spot - as the Sprit rover did in Gusev crater- a short drive can remedy the situation. There is also no reason to dig for permafrost. A rover should be able to sample ice expose from north polar cap directly.

    It seems to me that

    • Well, no doubt the rovers are great, but projects like the trenchdigging of this lander just wouldn't be possible within the confines of rover projects. It really is a problem of mass economics. A rover project needs a landing capsule where a lander doesn't; so you sacrifice mobility for mass and get a chance to do other experiments.

      • The Mars Science Rover will not be landing in a capsule [space.com]like Spirit or Opportunity. Furthermore, the size and power of the vehicle would be able to accomodate a trenching tool. For all I know there is already one planned. Furthermore the Atlas V vehicle that will launch the MSI can deliver over 3 times the landing mass to Mars than a Delta 2.

        • agreed. My argument is about budget. And MSL, with its much larger mass and plutonium power, I believe, will be a very much more expensive mission than Phoenix. The 'old school' lander strategy for Phoenix is just the easiest and cheapest way to get an 'interim' mission off to the poles and do some novel science while there.
          But of course what I always argue is that an astronaut would basically be able to achieve in an afternoon what all these other missions have achieved over the last 20 years...
  • NASA, require your scientists to learn the conversions constants between SI and Imperial units unless you want history [space.com] to repeat again! PS: SI rules!
    • No, having to learn a bunch of conversion constants is exactly what you don't want - that's what caused all the problems last time round.

      You want to move them completely and utterly to SI units. All memory of Imperial units should be purged, and there should be none of this "conversion" nonsense going on.
  • Compared to most other sites, their HTML isn't to bad. Actually uses some CSS layout.

    Why those links on the top are images, and not a css rollover... that's beyond me.

    Being a web standards geek... it makes me feel a little better seeing that.

    Oh yea... some of the gizmo's (not available at ThinkSecret) are available to view here:
    http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/technology/

    pretty cool stuff.

    • adverts (Score:2)

      by drwho ( 4190 )
      I am getting pretty sick of seeing people advertising the freeipods, freeminimacs, and web hosting in their slashdot sigs. I don't want to see your ads, but if your going to do that crap, at least don't be a rip-off, go pay slashdot for one of those ads on the sidebar.

      When I mod, I will mod down any post with an ad in it.
  • Finally, a major space project based on an open-source database. This is a huge boon for OSS, though it socks MySQL in the mouth.
  • ... reminds me of f... oh wait...
    doh!

  • I wonder if there are somewhere in NASA's back rooms, in a locked desk, a plan for a one way manned mission to Mars?

    I was thinking that it would make a mission to Mars within reach almost any time, and I would be willing to bet that there would be volunteers to do it.

    Much less expensive to go there, no orbiter or lander to come home. Much longer stay on the surface, no worries of long term radiation.

    A nuclear powered land anywhere plane, and the astronaughts could fly all over, land where interesting, d

    • Re:I wonder ??? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Darkman, Walkin Dude ( 707389 ) on Sunday January 16, 2005 @09:33AM (#11378526) Homepage

      Lets get this straight...

      I'm not sure whether you personally are advocating this approach, but I have seen plenty of other posts here that do specifically support the idea, and even a few volunteers. To you and all of those others, I ask have you lost your ever loving minds?

      You are talking about sacrificing a human life in exchange for a few months of scientific data. Heres a news flash for you, the whole of mars for the rest of its natural existence, and for that matter the whole of the sterile solar planetary system, isn't worth the cost of one human life. If it was a choice between seeing it all turned to rubble and saving a single person, I would not hesitate for a heartbeat to push the button and consign the dust to the solar winds.

      You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

      I have plenty of mod points here, but I felt it was more constructive to reply rather than modding this post into oblivion...

  • habitable (Score:2, Insightful)

    by edp927 ( 240364 )
    This ice-rich soil may be one of the few habitable environments on Mars where a biological system can survive.

    Wouldn't it be more fun/interesting to check out the uninhabitable places that life could survive? Or maybe the habitable places it couldn't?
    • This ice-rich soil may be one of the few habitable environments on Mars where a biological system can survive.

      Don't be so hard on the guy.

      He is just observing NASA's hard-learned insight that redundancy works.

      He is just observing NASA's hard-learned insight that redundancy works.

      He is just....oh, nevermind
  • So, they are calling it the Phoenix mission. They are giving away by that name where the "mars surface pictures" will really be coming from. Not that the current mission [uncoveror.com] is any different.

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