NASA's Phoenix Spacecraft Lands at Martian Arctic Site

PASADENA, Calif., May 25 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed
in the northern polar region of Mars Sunday to begin three months of examining
a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the
lander's robotic arm.
Radio signals received at 4:53:44 p.m. Pacific Time (7:53:44 p.m. Eastern
Time) confirmed the Phoenix Mars Lander had survived its difficult final
descent and touchdown 15 minutes earlier. The signals took that long to travel
from Mars to Earth at the speed of light.
Mission team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the University of Arizona,
Tucson, cheered confirmation of the landing and eagerly awaited further
information from Phoenix later Sunday tonight.
Among those in the JPL control room was NASA Administrator Michael
Griffin, who noted this was the first successful Mars landing without airbags
since Viking 2 in 1976.
"For the first time in 32 years, and only the third time in history, a JPL
team has carried out a soft landing on Mars," Griffin said. "I couldn't be
happier to be here to witness this incredible achievement."
During its 422-million-mile flight from Earth to Mars after launching on
Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix relied on electricity from solar panels during the
spacecraft's cruise stage. The cruise stage was jettisoned seven minutes
before the lander, encased in a protective shell, entered the Martian
atmosphere. Batteries provide electricity until the lander's own pair of solar
arrays spread open.
"We've passed the hardest part and we're breathing again, but we still
need to see that Phoenix has opened its solar arrays and begun generating
power," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager. If all goes
well, engineers will learn the status of the solar arrays between 7 and 7:30
p.m. Pacific Time (10 and 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time) from a Phoenix transmission
relayed via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.
The team will also be watching for the Sunday night transmission to
confirm that masts for the stereo camera and the weather station have swung to
their vertical positions.
"What a thrilling landing! But the team is waiting impatiently for the
next set of signals that will verify a healthy spacecraft," said Peter Smith
of the University of Arizona, principal investigator for the Phoenix mission.
"I can hardly contain my enthusiasm. The first landed images of the Martian
polar terrain will set the stage for our mission."
Another critical deployment will be the first use of the 7.7-foot-long
robotic arm on Phoenix, which will not be attempted for at least two days.
Researchers will use the arm during future weeks to get samples of soil and
ice into laboratory instruments on the lander deck.
The signal confirming that Phoenix had survived touchdown was relayed via
Mars Odyssey and received on Earth at the Goldstone, Calif., antenna station
of NASA's Deep Space Network.
Phoenix uses hardware from a spacecraft built for a 2001 launch that was
canceled in response to the loss of a similar Mars spacecraft during a 1999
landing attempt. Researchers who proposed the Phoenix mission in 2002 saw the
unused spacecraft as a resource for pursuing a new science opportunity.
Earlier in 2002, Mars Odyssey discovered that plentiful water ice lies just
beneath the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars. NASA chose the
Phoenix proposal over 24 other proposals to become the first endeavor in the
Mars Scout program of competitively selected missions.
The Phoenix mission is led by Smith at the University of Arizona with
project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin,
Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and
Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological
Institute. For more about Phoenix, visit http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix .
SOURCE NASA

Guy Webster, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., +1-818-354-5011,
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov, or Dwayne Brown, NASA Headquarters, Washington,
+1-202-358-1726, dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov; or Sara Hammond, University of
Arizona, Tucson, +1-520-626-1974, shammond@lpl.arizona.edu