Phoenix Mars Lander Blasts Off

Robotic Dirt And Ice Digger Begins 422M Mile Trip, Unmanned Rocket Should Reach Mars In Spring 2008

(CBS/AP)  A robotic dirt and ice digger rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, beginning a 422 million-mile journey that NASA hopes will culminate next spring in the first ever landing within the red planet's Arctic Circle.

The Phoenix Mars Lander blasted off before dawn, precisely on time, hurtling through the clear moonlit sky aboard an unmanned Delta rocket. The rocket looked as though it was heading straight for Mars, a bright reddish dot in the eastern sky.

The international space station emerged from Earth's shadow seconds before liftoff, a brilliant "star" above the launch pad, reports CBS News space analyst Bill Harwood.

The sky was pitch black and the Delta II rocket created an artificial sunrise along Florida's space coast. It streaked through the sky, at first looking like a fireball, and then, like a comet tail, sounding like continuous thunder in the distance, reports CBS News correspondent Peter King from the Kennedy Space Center.

Just over a minute after launch, six solid rocket boosters dropped off while the Delta continued streaking upward, reports King.

Peter Smith, the mission's principal scientist from the University of Arizona, ran out of the control center just before liftoff to watch from outside and took Mars' visibility as an auspicious sign for the spacecraft.

"It seemed to kind of get the scent there, you know, it was on its way," Smith said with a laugh. "Sort of like a bloodhound, it's going to find Mars."

Other researchers, such as Michael Hecht with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, jammed the beach. They shouted out the final 10 seconds of the countdown and hooted and hollered "Go, baby!" then toasted with champagne.

Not quite six hours later, the Phoenix Mars Lander was already 365,000 miles from Earth and had settled into a cruising speed of more than 12,000 mph. Everything seemed to be working fine, mission officials said.

"Next stop is Mars," exulted Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars exploration program.

If all goes as planned — a big if considering only five of the world's 15 attempts to land on Mars have succeeded — the spacecraft will set down on the Martian Arctic plains on May 25, 2008, and spend three months scooping up soil and ice, analyzing the samples in minuscule ovens and mixing bowls.

The Phoenix Mars Lander won't be looking for evidence of life on Mars but rather traces of organic compounds in the baked and moistened samples, which would be a possible indicator of conditions favorable for life, either now or once upon a time.

If organic compounds are present on Mars, they're more likely to have been preserved in ice. That's why NASA is aiming for the planet's high northern latitudes, where ice is almost certainly lurking just beneath the surface.

Only about six inches of soft red soil should cover the ice, and so the digger shouldn't have to probe too deeply. The ice is expected to be as hard as concrete, and a drill on the scoop will help gather enough frozen samples. Some dirt and ice samples will be baked and their vapors analyzed. Other soil samples will be mixed with onboard water and the muddy soup examined by onboard microscopes.

"We're really going there just to understand whether the conditions might have been hospitable for microbial life at some point," said the University of Arizona's William Boynton, lead scientist for the oven experiment.

Even if organic molecules pop up, they could be from incoming meteorites, Boynton noted. "It is important, I think, to keep in mind that we are just looking for organic molecules to see if the conditions are right that they could survive," he said, "and that we aren't really going to be making any inference about whether these molecules are indicative of life."

Mars landings are especially risky. Only five of the 15 U.S., Russian and European attempts have worked, all of them American successes beginning with the 1976 Viking touchdowns. Given those odds, the Phoenix team said it did everything possible to test for failures and will continue to do so as the spacecraft flies to Mars. The entire mission costs $420 million.

NASA has never attempted to land a spacecraft on Mars at such a high northern latitude. A lander intended for the red planet's South Pole went silent immediately upon arrival in 1999. That failure, combined with the loss of the companion Mars orbiter, prompted NASA to cancel a 2001 lander mission. The parts from that scrapped mission were used for Phoenix, thus its name, which alludes to the mythological bird that rises from its own ashes.

Mars' North Pole would have been too cold for Phoenix to operate, and so scientists opted for a little lower latitude for touchdown. Phoenix will be shooting for 68.35 degrees north latitude, comparable to Greenland or northern Alaska, and 233 degrees east longitude. The lander will parachute down, with pulse thrusters easing its final descent.

Scientists chose the flattest, rock-free zone they could to ensure success. The target landing area is "Kansas flat," according to the spacecraft team, with few if any big rocks that could overturn the stationary three-legged lander or bump against its circular solar panels and jam them. The 772-pound lander will stretch 18 feet across once its solar panels are deployed on Mars, and its weather mast will tower 7 feet.

Phoenix should help pave the way for human visitors, especially if it confirms the presence of water ice in large amounts near the pole, said Michael Meyer, NASA's lead Mars scientist. That would be a tremendous resource, he noted. But if organic matter is indeed found, it could pose a dichotomy: "As Mars gets more interesting, you may not want to send humans right away until you learn out a little bit more about the red planet and find out whether or not life ever got started there."

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson is thrilled to see another robot headed to Mars and is confident humans will follow. His novel "Green Mars" is one of dozens of writings going up on a disk aboard Phoenix.

"When people get there, they'll be able to do on the ground what maybe 100 robotic missions would have been able to do," Robinson said.

[generey]

They should have put the "Chimp" onboard,, Bush did say he wanted to go to Mars.
Posted by j-whitman at 04:10 PM : Aug 04, 2007

DITTO!!! LOL.

[mitch0927]

That rocket exhaust must have been really good for our atmosphere.

A lot you know, the fuel is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Your farts put out more green house gasses than that does.

[gorph001]

What; You responders don't want to advance with any technology?..Oh, I get it!...Just live in the bliss of ignorance!....don't even "TRY" to do anything new!!!.

[thisandthat1]

To all those complaining about the billions being spent on these missions to Mars, remember one thing .... they are not loading billions of dollars into the spacecraft and shooting it off to Mars. All the money, every last penny, is staying right here on Earth and being circulated right here on earth ... most of it here in the U.S.

[drummer94]

Pretty greedy there, aren't ya bri?

[robinhood-13]

I understand that this is an un-manned mission. Does that exclude Harry Reid? Or Ms. Pelosi??

[j-whitman]

They should have put the "Chimp" onboard,, Bush did say he wanted to go to Mars.

[cosmicfluke]

What a sinful waste of money. Let's spend kazillions dreaming of making the dead, red planet blue while killing this one as fast as we can. Good project for geeks.
"Fascinating". Yeah, so is roadkill.
That rocket exhaust must have been really good for our atmosphere.

[drummer94]

There goes the Iraqi government on "vacation".

[amazedd]

Civilization is made up of small steps in the right direction, and the few setbacks. Fascinating!

[my2centss]

If it was a home budget, they would have to pay off their bills first. Then they could go off and vacation on Mars. Face it we are going bankrupt, and spending billions here, and billions there, and getting pictures.

[fredegrar]

We could almost fund NASA for the next hundred years for what one year in Iraq cost. If we're going to try to improve our lot here on this planet by diverting resources towards our various problems, let's at least make some rational choices about which resources to divert. Why raid the little kid's savings account when there's an 800 lb Rockefeller-esque gorilla in the room?

[brianbwb-2009]

It's a cold, dirty, lifeless rock. There. Send me a million bucks and give the rest to the American Cancer Society.
Posted by drummer94

No, it is a cold, rusty, humanless rock, and if there is microbial life, it really doesn't matter. Send ME all the money.

[brianbwb-2009]

Two "Hubble" class telescopes, equidistant from earth in orbit around the sun, giving us a stereoscopic view of our universe, and two gravity wave sensors, also equidistant, could do mush more to advance astronomy and mathematics than ten Martian probes digging for stuff whose retrieval costs would not be worth discovery.

The photos are nice, however.

As far as finding extraterrestrial life, just assume it exists, and get on with improving the human condition.

[rushlimpdrug]

This is great news.
They can dig a hole in the ice and store the beer there till the "real" astronauts get there with the chicks.
If they take a camera they could shoot the first beer commercial from there.
Life is great on the red planet.

[drummer94]

It's a cold, dirty, lifeless rock. There. Send me a million bucks and give the rest to the American Cancer Society.

[barbaraf4]

"I am all in favor the space program, and would give them more money if possible. Many people have no idea of the benefits accrued through NASA over the years; it's sad that the AmPop hasn't been educated in this regard and still thinks space a trivial concern. It is the closest thing to pure research going on in America, and if we waited to clean up all the ills of our planet first, it would never happen at all." Posted by cneron
~~~
This might be the "closest thing to pure research going on in America"; however the benefit is to a limited number of scientists and businessmen. Every scientist out there has a theory just waiting for funding. [For example, the $100,000 grant to study if cats have feeling in their tails. Anyone who has ever stepped on a cat's tail knows that answer. So, where is my $100,000?] Every businessman even remotely associated with NASA is getting rich - want to bet Haliburton has a space research division - under a different name, of course, and under a no-bid umbrella. Benefits space travel has provided? Let me see....Corningware and Teflon!

If we are going to study the feasibility of colonizing another place in the solar system, let's study the moon again.

[oakishpines]

can spore blooms shift shapes like dragons

and glue forests on top of forests

and play with density to fly like dragons

and sprout as nerf buses for swift derbys

derbys earth and derbys sky

and if all the ten or 20 or thrity thousand chimpanzee squirel dragon folk what die hungry each day are kids age five and less, did 20,000 groups of 7,000 armed gaurds per group assemble to starve each one that last meal?? because nasa had all the funding?? and the journalists couldn't sell lazy scum??

and the armys had to dare and starve and rape school babies and shock and awe and starve and rape mideast babies and immigration reform and starve and rape immigrant babies and imprison and starve and rape minority babies??

and doctors were busy fading to high pressure sales sponsered by big dollar drug companies that push for the biggest sales prices on the lowest bid drugs??

is there a god? is there a congress? is there tens of thousands of starved and raped chimpanzee squireel dragon babies each day??

rallied around their own sick beds dancing their own pornographic get well soon feed the world first aid on the trail songs and their own non-pornographic get sick soon tax the world first strike on the trail songs??

[olebd]

I'm going to have to side with support for spending money here on earth for now. I'll agree there has been some technology developed by NASA that we all now benefit from but, I also think a lot of the hype you hear is generated by NASA in an effort to justify their existence and prove that they are worth their budget and then some much like the rest of our government agencies do.

Right now, we have too many areas where the money could be better spent, such as feeding the hungry, education, border enforcement, infrastructure, etc.

Space exploration is a area where we should encourage more global participation so that we not only strengthen international ties but we also have someone else to help foot the bill.

[elgraz]

Reel-Crazy, I'm with you amigo. Charity begins at home. Let's take care of our sick planet first.