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.
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