Phoenix Mars Scout
Rising out of the Martian dust and ice from an earlier,
failed NASA Mars lander is the proposed Phoenix Mars Scout.
Peter Smith of the University of
Arizona, Tucson, is the team leader for Phoenix. If the University of Arizona
wins a go-ahead, the $284 million project would be the largest ever awarded in
the university's history.
The University of Arizona Lunar
and Planetary Laboratory's Phoenix mission is a re-flight of the failed,
never-heard-from-again Mars Polar Lander. It apparently crashed on the red
planet on December 3, 1999.
This time, however, Phoenix
would head to the northern plains of Mars, hauling built-but-never-flown
instruments for a cancelled 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander.
By landing at the high northern
latitudes on Mars, Phoenix would follow up on the discovery of near surface ice
by the now-orbiting Mars Odyssey. This zone is one of the few places on Mars
that presents the possibility of the periodic presence of liquid water as
orbital dynamics change the regional climate.
The Phoenix comes replete with a robotic
arm to excavate a trench and retrieve samples for geological and chemical
analysis.
"We will be able to make a very
accurate analysis of what promises to be some of Mars' more habitable terrain…a
place where organics may have a stable environment," Smith said in a university
statement.
Smith and University of Arizona
planetary scientist William Boynton, who is a co-investigator on the candidate
Phoenix mission, both had science instruments on the ill-fated Mars Polar
Lander. The lander was equipped with Smith's cameras and robotic arm, and
Boynton's thermal and evolved gas analyzer to measure the composition of Martian
soil.
|
Click to
enlarge
|
Phoenix would carry improved,
but never flown, 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander instruments. In addition, Smith's
stereo imaging camera and robotic arm, as well as Boynton's thermal and evolved
gas analyzer that augured into Mars in 1999 would fly onboard the 2007 Scout
mission.
Total win for science
In many ways, the technical side
of several of these missions is clearly challenging.
NASA's Garvin said the Scout
teams selected made convincing arguments at this first phase time period that
their technical challenges were tolerable for a 2007 launch.
Picking the Scout candidate
missions involved 85 reviewers who took part in Science Panel and
Technical-Management-Cost Panel
deliberations. These groups worked for months to determine risk and science
value.
NASA's Ed Weiler, Associate
Administrator for Space Science, made the final Scout selections at the space
agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. He will also select the Scout mission
to fly in 2007 by next August.
"Mars Scout is our way of
engaging the broadest community to do new science in new ways and, ideally, as
cost effectively as possible. From my standpoint, this was a total 'win' for
science. We have something for everyone here scientifically… involving new
principal investigators who are amongst the best in the planetary science
community. I am dazzled!" Garvin said.
advertisement
