Engineer sweats new Mars lander
Hunt for flaws in Phoenix craft keeps him 'scared'
Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
Published February 2, 2007 at midnight
NASA engineer Barry Goldstein said he's "scared to death" about the Colorado-built Phoenix Mars Lander, and everybody else on the mission should be, too.
"You've got to be constantly scared to death and have the perspective that there are flaws in the system," Goldstein said Thursday, while standing alongside the solar-powered Phoenix lander in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems southwest of Denver in Jefferson County.
"That doesn't mean that there are flaws, but you have to constantly be hunting to find them if they are there," said Goldstein, NASA's Phoenix project manager.
Phoenix is fully assembled and is undergoing various tests at Lockheed Martin before it gets shipped to Florida in May, said Edward Sedivy, Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin.
Launch is set for August.
Named for the mythical bird reborn from its own ashes, the three-legged Phoenix lander will carry new versions of scientific instruments destroyed when another Lockheed Martin-built NASA craft, Mars Polar Lander, crashed while landing in late 1999.
Phoenix mission costs were supposed to be capped at $386 million. But Goldstein said it is $31 million over budget.
Last week, NASA officials granted Phoenix mission leaders approval to proceed to launch despite the overruns.
Phoenix will land on, and dig into, the northern polar plains of Mars, where vast stores of ice have been detected just below the surface.
It has an 8-foot robotic arm with a scoop and an electric grinder at the end.
The scoop will dig through surface soil, then the cutting tool will grind into ice beneath, said lead Phoenix scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona.
The scoop will dump frozen soil and ice into a set of tiny ovens that will melt it to determine its chemical composition.
"Is it the kind of chemistry that - if you were a farmer - you could add a seed and it would grow?" Smith asked.
"What we're looking for is a place where life could exist," he said.
ericksonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5129
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