Tomorrow is Here - Mars Phoenix Lander

Mars Phoenix Lander
Phoenix Mars Mission News Feed
Phoenix in the news.
Mars Odyssey Still Hears Nothing From Phoenix NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander showed no sign during February that it has revived itself after the northern Mars winter. NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will check again in early April. The solar-powered Phoenix lander operated for two months longer than its planned three-month mission in the Martian arctic in 2008. It was not designed to withstand winter conditions. However, in case the return of abundant springtime sunlight to the site does revive Phoenix, Odyssey is conducting three periods of listening for a transmission that Phoenix is programmed to send if it is able. The second listening period, with 60 overflights of the Phoenix site from Feb. 22 to Feb. 26, produced the same result as the first listening period in January: no signal heard. NASA To Check For Unlikely Winter Survival Of Mars Lander UPDATE NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has completed 11 overflights, listening for the Phoenix Mars Lander on Jan. 19 and 20, without hearing anything from the lander. Nineteen more listening overflights are planned this week, and additional attempts in February and March. The attempts are being made because of the unlikely scenario that Phoenix has survived Martian arctic winter conditions the spacecraft was never designed to withstand. Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, 2008, and operated successfully about two months longer than its planned three-month mission near the Martian north polar region. End of Update Beginning Jan. 18, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will listen for possible, though improbable, radio transmissions from the Phoenix Mars Lander, which completed five months of studying an arctic Martian site in November 2008. The solar-powered lander operated two months longer than its three-month prime mission during summer on northern Mars before the seasonal ebb of sunshine ended its work. Since then, Phoenix's landing site has gone through autumn, winter and part of spring. The lander's hardware was not designed to survive the temperature extremes and ice-coating load of an arctic Martian winter. NASA Phoenix Results Point To Martian Climate Cycles -- Favorable chemistry and episodes with thin films of liquid water during ongoing, long-term climate cycles may sometimes make the area where NASA's Phoenix Mars mission landed last year a favorable environment for microbes. Interpretations of data that Phoenix returned during its five months of operation on a Martian arctic plain fill four papers in this week's edition of the journal Science, the first major peer-reviewed reports on the mission's findings. Phoenix ended communications in November 2008 as the approach of Martian winter depleted energy from the lander's solar panels. "Not only did we find water ice, as expected, but the soil chemistry and minerals we observed lead us to believe this site had a wetter and warmer climate in the recent past -- the last few million years -- and could again in the future," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Phoenix Team Still At Work As Anniversary Approaches May 20, 2009 -- It has been nearly one year since NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission successfully landed on the polar region of Mars on May 25, 2008, but the science team remains hard at work. Principal investigator Peter Smith and a portion of the Phoenix team continues to work at the Science Operations Center in Tucson, Ariz., where the entire science team began their journey last summer. Three other laboratories remain active as Phoenix's Extended Mission Operations continue. NASA Edge Presents 2009 Mission Madness What fun is March Madness if you can only play basketball on Earth? Travel into space and beyond with NASA EDGE’s Mission Madness to vote for your favorite NASA mission. Beginning Thursday, March 19th, participants will be able to begin voting. Voters can get started now by clicking here to view the lineup of 64 NASA missions, learn about mission goals, and predict which missions their fellow fans will vote for during this single elimination round. Participants will be able to  vote for their favorite missions as many times as they like while  polls are open, with the very first Mission Madness Championship  Winner determined on April 8th, 2009. Peter Smith on Phoenix Mars Mission - EarthSky Podcast Chemicals on Mars Possibly the Salt of Life - EarthSky Podcast Phoenix Mars Lander Team Wins 2009 Swigert Award for Space Exploration The Space Foundation has awarded its 2009 John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., Award for Space Exploration to NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander team "in recognition of the technical developments that led to one of the most startling and meaningful discoveries of the new millennium," the Space Foundation announced today. The award will be presented at the foundation's 25th National Space Symposium to be held in Colorado Springs, Colo., on March 30. It honors the memory of Jack Swigert, the Apollo 13 command module pilot on the 1970 manned lunar-landing mission crew that successfully returned to Earth despite great hardship caused by an electrical explosion that crippled the spacecraft. "It is a tremendous honor to win this award that honors a great American space hero who had a bold vision, but was given slim odds for success," said Peter H. Smith of The University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, principal investigator for the Phoenix Mars Mission. Antarctic Expedition Prepared Researchers For Mars Project About half a year before the robotic arm on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander began digging into soil and subsurface ice of an arctic plain of Mars, six scientists traveled to one of the coldest, driest places on Earth for soil-and-ice studies that would end up aiding analysis of the Mars data. They used duplicates of some of the Phoenix spacecraft's instruments, plus other methods, in the Antarctic Dry Valleys where breaks in the south polar ice sheet leave windswept rocky terrain exposed. Their two-week expedition, overlapping New Year's Day 2008, was part of the International Polar Year, a multipronged scientific program focused on the Arctic and Antarctic from March 2007 to March 2009. "We wanted to gain experience with our Phoenix instruments in one of the most Mars-like environments on Earth," said Leslie Tamppari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. She is the project scientist for Phoenix and principal investigator for the Antarctic Dry Valleys expedition, though pregnancy kept her from making the trip to Antarctica. HiRISE Shows Most Recent Image of Phoenix's Landing Site -- A telescopic camera in orbit around Mars captured an image of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on December 21. Summer turned to autumn for the Phoenix Mars Lander on December 26, 2008. This image, taken on December 21 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows the lander during the last waning days of northern hemisphere summer. The image was acquired at 3:31 pm Local Mars Time when the sun was 14-degrees above the horizon. The image is false color, but appears bluish due to atmospheric haze. Frost is not yet apparent here during the middle afternoon. This is the first image targeted to the lander since it ceased activity, and is one of a series of images designed to monitor the Phoenix landing site for changes over time due to atmospheric haze, deposition or removal of dust, or formation of frost as winter approaches. HiRISE previously captured an image of Phoenix’s descent on May 25, seen here, and an image of Phoenix’s landing site with a much redder surface, seen here. More HiRISE images of Mars can be seen on their site here.