Phoenix To Rise Again

NASA Announced Thursday that plans to send a new lander to Mars have been approved. The Phoenix lander is a stationary craft with a long arm designed to look for water, ice and possible indicators of life. The Phoenix mission should launch in August 2007, sending the scout to the icy ground of the far northern martian plains.

"The Phoenix Mission explores new territory in the northern plains of Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth," said the project's principal investigator, Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "NASA's confirmation supports this project and may eventually lead to discoveries relating to life on our neighboring planet."

Phoenix is a stationary lander with a robotic arm to dig down to the martian ice layer and lift samples to analytical instruments on the lander's deck. It is specifically designed to measure water and organic molecules in the northern polar region of Mars. NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of ice-rich soil very near the surface in the arctic regions in 2002.

The 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, mothballed in 2000, is being resurrected for Phoenix. Many of the scientific instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for that mission or the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander in 1999.

"Phoenix revives pieces of past missions in order to take NASA's Mars exploration into an exciting future," said NASA's Director, Solar System Division, Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Andrew Dantzler.

The cost of the Phoenix mission is $386 million, includes launch costs. The University of Arizona; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Martin Space Systems and the Canadian Space Agency are all contributing to the partnership.

"The confirmation review is an important step for all major NASA missions," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, project manager for Phoenix. "This approval essentially confirms NASA's confidence that the spacecraft and science instruments will be successfully built and launched, and that once the lander is on Mars, the science objectives can be successfully achieved."

Team members have a lot of work to do. They will assemble and test every subsystem on the spacecraft and science payload to ensure compliance with design requirements. Oh, and one more thing. They still have to select a landing site. They plan to use data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launching in August 2005.

FMI: www.jpl.nasa.gov, http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu