TUCSON, Ariz. - NASA's
Phoenix Mars Lander has flexed its robotic arm for the first time and taken
a fish-eye panorama of its surroundings, mission scientists said Thursday.
"We have now achieved
a major milestone for this mission," said Phoenix project manager Barry
Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) via a video link in a mission briefing held here
at the University of Arizona.
Phoenix beamed back
images that confirmed it had successfully unstowed its scoop-tipped arm, as it steadily
settles in at its northern polar home since its successful
Sunday landing.
"I'm ecstatic to let you
know that [the robotic arm deployment] was successful," said Matt Robinson, the
Robotic Arm Flight Software Lead at JPL. "It is raring to go. It's busted loose
now and we're ready to go."
Phoenix also sent back
a completed black-and-white panorama mosaic of its landing site, showing the
deployed solar arrays, robotic arm, meteorological mast and the flat terrain
stretching out toward the horizon. The $422 million spacecraft is designed
to dig down into the Martian arctic soils to the layers of water ice
thought to lie beneath the surface.
"We have a very
hummocky terrain," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the
University of Arizona, describing the polygonal-shaped bumps that cover the
arctic landscape and which are separated by trenches in the soil. The shapes
are believed to be formed by the expansion and contraction of the water ice
underneath.
The images also show a
scattering of "flat, table-like rocks," as Smith described them.
The Phoenix science
team has begun naming the rocks they find to keep track of them, using a fairy
tale and folklore theme (so that the science team can have a little fun, Smith
said). The rocks that have been named so far include "Humpty Dumpty," the
"King's Men," and "Alice" (in reference to Lewis Carroll's "Alice in
Wonderland").
The science team plans
to use the robotic arm to move some of the rocks, which are only a few inches
across, to see what's underneath them. They will also investigate the origin of
the rocks.
"The rocks don't come
with labels, it's a little hard to tell where they came from," Smith said.
But first, mission
controllers plan to test out the robotic arm's joints in higher and lower
temperatures on the red planet, "and that's because the robotic arm is going to
be required to move at a range of temperatures," Robinson explained. Weather
reports from the surface so far show a high temperature at the landing site
of -22 degrees Fahrenheit (-30 degrees Celsius) to a low of -112 F (-80 C).
Controllers will also
position the arm so that the camera attached to its scoop can snap a picture of
the surface under the lander, to make sure no rocks are there.
Scientists have
divided the terrain into two parts: a "national park" area that mission
scientists will leave untouched until they have better characterized the
environment, and an area they can use to test out the robotic arms digging
capabilities.
"It's more of a
Superfund site over there, so we're allowed to mess that part up a bit," Smith
said.
Digging likely won't
start until the middle of next week, mission scientists said.
NASA's next Phoenix mission briefing will be broadcast live
on NASA TV at 2:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday, May 30. Click
here for SPACE.com's Phoenix mission coverage and
a link
to NASA TV.
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