Mars lander to touch down Sunday

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, May 19, 2008

NASA

An artist's rendering of the Phoenix Mars Lander as it begins to shut down operations as winter sets in.

NASA

Spacecraft technician Billy Jones inspects the robotic arm of the lander. The arm will dig into icy soil and bring back samples to the science deck of the spacecraft for analysis.

The Colorado-built Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet on Sunday to begin boring through rock, scraping up ice and melting it in its high-tech oven.

What the heated water turns up will go a long way in determining whether Mars could have sustained life in the past.

"It would be the first spacecraft on Mars to actually touch water," said Gary Napier, spokesman for Lockheed-Martin, the Jefferson County based company that built the lander.

The Phoenix Mars Lander was launched last August aboard a Delta II rocket built by United Launch Alliance of Denver.

About 30 Lockheed-Martin scientists and technicians have been flying the lander remotely from Jefferson County the past 91/2 months, in conjunction with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Eighteen feet wide and just a few feet tall, the lander weighs 900 pounds. It is scheduled to touch down in Mars' northern latitudes - the equivalent of landing on Earth in Greenland or northern Alaska.

Space scientists expect there is a large amount of water, in the form of ice, just below the surface in the northern end of Mars.

Scientists will take it slow, giving the lander a 90-day stay on Mars as it snoops around, finding likely spots to scrape and drill.

The lander's robotic arm will reach out from the top of the spacecraft. It has a scraper similar to a backhoe's and a rasp to drill into the rock and ice. The ice is expected to be the hardness of a sidewalk.

When it has scraped up some ice, the robotic arm will bring the ice back into the spacecraft and carefully put it into a Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, "basically an oven," Napier said.

When the ice is heated, various compounds will be released. The oven's analyzers can sniff the compounds and determine what they are.

"There are a ton of different things we are looking for in the water - but one thing we're especially trying to find is organic compounds," Napier said.

"Anything with carbon in it," he said. "That would indicate a habitat that could support life."

The Phoenix Mars Lander can't actually detect life, "but we're looking for a habitat that life could have existed in," he said. "We are carbon-based life forms - that's why we're looking for carbon."