Astronomy Down Under

Phoenix

6 Aug at 16:35 by Wilson

Somehow, I allowed the whole month of July to go by without a single post here. And now, this blog comes back from its own ashes, nicely tying with the launch of the new Mars Lander…

Phoenix was, finally, launched last Saturday at 5:26am Florida time (7:26pm Melbourne time), and it should land on 25 May next year (no word on the expected time of the landing so far) near the north pole of the red planet.

The Phoenix lander is very different from its more famous cousins, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity; Phoenix will not move across the planet once it touched down. Instead, it will make detailed studies of the area on which it lands with the explicit intent of finding water. With that goal, it will land on an arctic region (close to, but outside, the polar ice cap) that seems to have a high amount of water under the ground (these observations were made by the Mars Odyssey orbiter) and will use an impressive array of instruments to explore its neighbourhood.

Most impressive of all is its robotic arm, which is almost 2.4 metres long and capable of digging up to half a meter into the soil; it is expected to reach a hard layer of ice before going that deep, though, and if it does it will scrape the ice to get samples, which will then be analysed by a collection of devices, including optical and atomic-force microscopes, a gas analyser and a conductivity probe. It also carries a full weather station and an stereo imaging camera, not to mention a further camera positioned at the tip of its arm.

This is the third lander intended for a polar region of Mars; the previous ones, the Mars Polar Lander, failed at landing due to human error in its programming. Let’s hope that the Phoenix fares better; we shall now in 9 months.