LOS
ANGELES (AP) -- NASA is moving ahead with plans to put a long-armed lander on Mars' icy north pole to
search for clues for water and possible signs of life, the space agency said
Thursday.
The
$386 million Phoenix Mars is scheduled to touch down in the Martian arctic in
May 2008. The stationary probe will use its robotic arm to dig into the icy
terrain and scoop up soil samples to analyze. In 2002, the Mars Odyssey orbiter
spotted evidence of ice-rich soil near the arctic surface.
Scientists
hope the Phoenix
mission will yield clues to the geologic history of water on the Red Planet and
determine whether microbes existed in the ice.
Phoenix will be the
first mission of the Mars Scout program, a renewed, low-cost effort to study
the Red Planet.
During
the next two years, scientists will test the spacecraft and payload as well as
choose a landing site in the northern latitudes based on information gathered
by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that will launch in August.
"The
Phoenix mission explores new territory in the
northern plains of Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth,"
principal investigator Peter Smith of the University
of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement.
True
to its name, Phoenix
rose from the ashes of previous missions. The lander
for Phoenix was
built to fly as part of the 2001 Mars Surveyor program. But the program was
scrapped after the high-profile disappearance of the Mars Polar Lander in 1999.
The Polar Lander lost contact during a landing attempt near the planet's south
pole after its rocket engine shut off prematurely, causing the spacecraft to
tumble about 130 feet to almost certain destruction.
The
Phoenix probe had been in storage at a Lockheed
Martin clean room in Denver
before it was resurrected for its current mission. It will carry science
instruments that were designed for the Mars Surveyor program including an
improved panoramic camera and a trench-digging robotic arm.
Phoenix will lift off
from the Kennedy Space Center
in August 2007 and land on the planet nine months later. The mission is managed
by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
advertisement
