Phoenix makes picture-perfect Mars landing
PASADENA, Calif. - 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.
[More…]
