NASA's Phoenix Mars lander spent its first full day in the Martian arctic plains checking its instruments in preparation for an ambitious digging mission to study whether the site could have once been habitable.
The three-legged lander set down on Sunday in relatively flat terrain covered by fissures outlining polygon shapes. The geometric cracks are likely caused by the repeated freezing and thawing of buried ice.
Images beamed back late on Monday showed the elbow joint of Phoenix’s trench-digging robotic arm still partly covered by a protective sheath. The sheath was supposed to fully unwrap after landing.
PHOTO: AP
Mission scientists downplayed the problem, saying they could still wiggle out the arm for digging.
“This is a minor inconvenience,” said Deborah Bass, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “We’re going to have to do a little bit of disentangling.”
It will be another week before Phoenix takes the first scoop of soil. After the initial taste test, the lander will spend the rest of the mission clawing through layers of soil to reach ice that is believed to be buried up to 30cm below the surface.
“We’ve only looked at one tiny little slit” of the landing site, said principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
While Phoenix continued to dazzle scientists with scenes from the Martian high northern latitudes, one image that it returned of the sun came out bleeded. Instead of a point in the sky, the sun appeared like a light saber sword. Bass said engineers were working to fix the problem.
Mission co-scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis is pleased with Phoenix’s progress so far.
“Like a union worker, it went right to work,” he said.
Scientists were especially interested in how the polygon patterns in the ground formed at Phoenix’s landing site. The fractures look similar to those found on Earth’s polar regions. Arvidson said Phoenix appeared within reach of a shallow trough that could be a potential place to dig.
“I was just afraid that it’ll be so flat and homogenous and that we’d be digging in soil and we wouldn’t know the context” of how it formed, Arvidson said.
Launched last summer, Phoenix sailed through 679 million kilometers of space over a period of about 10 months.
The riskiest part of the journey came seven minutes before landing, when Phoenix, operating on autopilot, had to use the atmosphere’s friction, deploy its parachute and fire its dozen thrusters to slow to a 8kph thump.
The lander executed the maneuver almost flawlessly. The only snag came when it released the parachute seven seconds later than expected. The late timing caused the spacecraft to land slightly down range from its intended target.
Two hours after touchdown, Phoenix beamed back a flood of images revealing the first ever peek of the polar horizon. It also sent back images of its unfolded heat shield and another of its foot planted in soil next to pebble-sized rocks.
Smith said Phoenix slid a bit after landing.
The US$420 million mission is led by the University of Arizona and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS