I really dig this stuff, so much that I'm watching the coverage on NASA and The Science Channel. http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/25/mars.lander/index.html The first-ever landing of a probe near Mars' north pole took place successfully on Sunday, NASA confirmed. The Mars Phoenix Lander, completing a 296-day journey, closed in on the Red Planet with a 50-50 chance of a successful touchdown on its arctic plains, NASA officials said. The landing -- dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" -- was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who have witnessed the failure of similar missions. In mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, they celebrated the lander's much-anticipated entry. "It was better than we could have imagined," Barry Goldstein, project manager for the Phoenix mission, told CNN. The Phoenix's 90-day mission is to analyze the soils and permafrost of Mars' arctic tundra for signs of past or present life. The lander is equipped with a robotic arm capable of scooping up ice and dirt to look for organic evidence that life once existed there, or even exists now. "We are not going to be able to answer the final question of is there life on Mars," said principal investigator Peter Smith, an optical scientist with the University of Arizona. "We will take the next important step. We'll find out if there's organic material associated with this ice in the polar regions. Ice is a preserver, and if there ever were organics on Mars and they got into that ice, they will still be there today." The twin to the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft, Phoenix was supposed to travel to Mars in 2001 as the Mars Surveyor spacecraft. They were originally part of the "better, faster, cheaper" program, formulated by then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to beef up planetary exploration on a lean budget. But Polar malfunctioned during its descent into Mars' atmosphere in 1999 and crashed. An investigation concluded that as many as a dozen design flaws or malfunctions doomed the spacecraft. The failure of that mission, as well as another spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter the same year, led to NASA to put future missions on hold and rethink the "better, faster, cheaper" approach. Mars Surveyor went to the warehouse. But all was not lost. In 2003, Smith proposed a plan to re-engineer the Mars Surveyor and fly it on a mission to look for signatures of life in the ice and dirt of Mars far North. Mars Phoenix, literally and figuratively, rose from the ashes of Surveyor. Engineers set to work, testing and retesting the onboard system to ferret out and fix all the flaws they could find. "We always have to be scared to death," Goldstein said. "The minute we lose fear is the minute that we stop looking for the next problem." The team was concerned about the Phoenix landing system. NASA had not successfully landed a probe on Mars using landing legs and stabilizing thrusters since the Viking missions in the late 1970s. The other three successful Mars landings -- Pathfinder in 1997 and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004 -- used massive airbags that inflated around the landing craft just before landing to cushion the impact. The Phoenix doesn't have airbags because the lander is too big and heavy for them to work properly. Its landing site was targeted for the far northern plains of Mars, near the northern polar ice cap. Data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft indicate large quantities of ice there, likely in the form of permafrost, either on the surface or just barely underground. advertisement "Follow the water" has become the unifying theme of NASA's Mars exploration strategy. In 2004, the rover Opportunity found evidence that a salty sea once lapped the shores of an area near Mars' equator called Meridiani Planum. Astrobiologists generally agree that it's best to look for life in wet places.
who cares about space exploration? i'd rather watch "A Connie Chung Christmas" sorry i just saw that episode
Interesting timing, as I just caught Mission to Mars for the first time on Starz this afternoon. It got really bad reviews, but I actually enjoyed it. I pretty much eat up any space exploration movie though, because I'm endlessly fascinated by the thought of life on other planets (and I am absolutely certain that it exists, somewhere). On a side note, my dad is a thermal engineer at NASA and has been responsible for engineering parts for the international space station. I need to ask him if he had a hand in this new Mars rover.
They probably won't get much out of it. I mean, look how long it took to dig out the mammoths in Siberia and eat them, hmmm, anybody up for some Martian Mammoths?
Mars B*tches!!!! Got give it up to Faux News for being the only network to carry the landing live. It's a proud day for us Americans.
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Take a look at a picture that was taken just after the first one in this thread. What could that be on the horizon?
Wow! I had no idea that this was going on at the moment!! Thanks for keeping us up to date with NASAs goings on. I'm so glad they are focusing around the polar regions, hope they landed somewhere near this intriguing mystery: http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2008/133/colossal-plants-revisit.htm Would love a few pictures of that from a ground level!!!!!!
Love this stuff...was watching yesterday when it landed. When did the first pictures finally come across? I had heard they were expected at about 9 last night.
Have not been able to watch the coverage but the successful landing is fantastic news! The people who've spent their careers working on Mars-related science generally believe that these caps provide the best chance of organisms (single cell, nothing fancy.) The continuous melt and thaw of the subsurface (hence not evaporating) water is what gets those folks excited. If anyone wants a lot more information, you could do worse than finding the publications of Chris P. McKay. He is an inspirational scientist, to me at least. Part biologist, part physicist, and part geochemist, willing to do crazy field trips (okay, not to Mars, but say Siberia for long stretches of winter to study the bacteria, etc). Here's an article on how to define and find life on other worlds. McKay did a lot of work predicting water availability levels near the poles of Mars, in the early 1990's. You can find more work from him by using Google scholar. Try: author:c-mckay mars He's also just a very cool guy with roughly zero ego...
Here's one of the lander parachuting down next to a crater. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
OooOOOooh Mars. WOW. boring We still don't know what's in the bottom of our oceans and we're worried about taking pictures of some other planet. ppffffft. I would rather see pictures of crazy dinosaur looking things at the bottom of the sea.
Hmmm I'm not to happy about this mission.. How many 100 of millions went into it this time? I mean seriously the two rovers that lasted months and months with TONS of data didn't do enough? It's Oil.. Nasa is trying to find Oil on Mars.. hahah
First let me preface by saying that this is one of my all time favorite action movies. I've probably seen it 20 times. Having said that, I just caught this quote. "A few weeks ago, I met somebody... A woman... I learned a few things... Like... I've been playing for the wrong team..." I had no idea that Cohagen and Houser had some scandalous dirt between them. If Cohagen thinks that he can just use up men and reset their cmos, he's got another thing coming (so to speak). That explains why Richter was was pissed. Richter was Cohagen's b**** and then Cohagen saw prime rib in Houser. He reprogrammed Richter, but they didn't quite have the method refined and Richter recalled, while Houser was giving Cohagen the bone. Then Cohagen finished with Houser as he has done time and time again, but still had feelings for him. As a send-off, he gave Houser Richter's fine ass ho. He never respected Richter because Richter was dirty little b****. Richter really didn't care for her. He was just possessive. Actually he was mad for Houser, but he knew that he wasn't good enough for the 12 time Mr. Mars. All the references to the party at the end makes perfect sense now.
