It’s just a few hours until NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander makes it’s landing attempt on the planet Mars. It’s headed for the Martian arctic, which is farther north than any other spacecraft has landed on the red planet. In fact, only five landings have been successful, out of the eleven previous attempts.
Shortly after the annual 500-mile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Phoenix will be approaching Mars at about 12,750 miles per hour. After it enters the top of the Martian atmosphere at that velocity, it must use superheated friction with the atmosphere, a strong parachute and a set of pulsing retrorockets to achieve a safe, three-legged standstill touchdown on the surface in just seven minutes. That’s the scariest seven minutes of the entire mission.
The earliest possible time when mission controllers could get confirmation from Phoenix indicating it has survived landing will be at 7:53 p.m. Eastern Time.
The landing site is expected to have ice-rich permafrost beneath the surface, but within reach of the lander’s eight-foot robotic arm. Phoenix is equipped to study the history of the water now frozen into the site’s permafrost, to check for carbon-containing chemicals that are essential ingredients for life, and to monitor polar-region weather on Mars from a surface perspective for the first time.
The Phoenix mission is led by the University of Arizona with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Read more about Phoenix at:
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu