Phoenix Readies for Launch

CAPE CANAVERAL – NASA's next Mars spacecraft arrived this month at Kennedy Space Center, where the lander will be readied for a late-summer launch on a mission to search for signs of past or present microbial life in the Martian arctic.

Riding atop a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket, the Phoenix spacecraft is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 5:35 a.m. Aug. 3.

The liftoff will propel the top-shaped craft on a nine-month journey to Mars, a planet that scientists think was once warmer, wetter and perhaps more hospitable to primitive life.

The delivery to KSC marked the start of a three-month campaign to perform final checkouts of spacecraft systems and scientific instruments.

"This is a critical milestone for our mission," Peter Smith, principal investigator from the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a statement. It caps the end of spacecraft assembly and factory testing and "shows our instruments are capable of meeting the high-level requirements of the mission," he said.

Built by Lockheed Martin in Denver, the spacecraft is dubbed Phoenix because it revives the scientific objectives of two NASA spacecraft that were lost en route to Mars in 1999 -- the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander.

Due to arrive on the northern arctic plains of the planet next May, the spacecraft will use a robotic arm to dig through protective top soil and scoop up water-ice believed to be within an arm's length of the surface.

Soil samples then will be returned to a lander platform for scientific analyses. The craft is equipped with a suite of sophisticated instruments that will examine the ice-rich soil for organic material or other evidence that microbial life might have arisen on Mars or might still exist on the red planet.

The spacecraft arrived at KSC after a cross-country trip from its manufacturing plant in Denver. It was transported to a payload processing facility in the KSC Industrial Area, where it was uncrated and readied for extensive tests of its systems and science instruments.

NASA contractor United Launch Alliance will begin building up a Delta 2 rocket at Launch Complex 17A in the third week of June.

The rocket's first stage will be hoisted and then nine strap-on solid rocket boosters will be raised and attached to it. The second stage will be added in early July followed by the spacecraft about three weeks later. The rocket's payload fairing -- the protective nosecone that will surround the lander -- will be installed a week before liftoff.

The lander's arrival at the launch site buoyed the spirits of program managers and project scientists.

"We're excited to be going back to Mars," said Ed Sedivy, program manager with spacecraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

"The arctic plains are the right place for the next step in Mars exploration, and this is the right time to go there," said project scientist Leslie Tamppari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We expect to touch the Martian for the first time -- a real leap in NASA's follow-the-water strategy."

The mission is a joint endeavor of the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany and Finland.

• Images: Visualizations of Mars
• Phoenix Lander Readied For Mars Exploration
• Phoenix Mars Lander: Getting Down and Dirty On the Red Planet
• Phoenix Mars Lander: Strong Arming The Red Planet
• All About Mars

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