MARS PHOENIX MISSION UPDATE
25 August 2008
The next sample of Martian soil being grabbed for analysis is coming from a trench about three times deeper than any other trench NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has dug.
On Tuesday, Aug. 26, the spacecraft will finish the 90 Martian days (or “sols”) originally planned as its primary mission and will continue into a mission extension through September, as announced by NASA in July. Phoenix landed on May 25.
“As we near what we originally expected to be the full length of the mission, we are all thrilled with how well the mission is going,” said Phoenix Project Manger Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Continue reading ‘Phoenix Digs Deeper As Third Month Nears End’
MARS PHOENIX UPDATE
14 August 2008
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has taken the first-ever image of a single particle of Mars’ ubiquitous dust, using its atomic force microscope.
The particle — shown at higher magnification than anything ever seen from another world — is a rounded particle about one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across. It is a speck of the dust that cloaks Mars. Such dust particles color the Martian sky pink, feed storms that regularly envelop the planet and produce Mars’ distinctive red soil.
“This is the first picture of a clay-sized particle on Mars, and the size agrees with predictions from the colors seen in sunsets on the Red Planet,” said Phoenix co-investigator Urs Staufer of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, who leads a Swiss consortium that made the microscope.
“Taking this image required the highest resolution microscope operated off Earth and a specially designed substrate to hold the Martian dust,” said Tom Pike, Phoenix science team member from Imperial College London. “We always knew it was going to be technically very challenging to image particles this small.”
Continue reading ‘Phoenix Microscope Takes First Image of Martian Dust Particle’
NASA MISSION UPDATE
5 August 2008
Phoenix Mars mission scientists spoke today on research in progress concerning an ongoing investigation of perchlorate salts detected in soil analyzed by the wet chemistry laboratory aboard NASA’s Phoenix Lander.
“Finding perchlorates is neither good nor bad for life, but it does make us reassess how we think about life on Mars,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA), the instrument that includes the wet chemistry laboratory.
If confirmed, the result is exciting, Hecht said, “because different types of perchlorate salts have interesting properties that may bear on the way things work on Mars if — and that’s a big ‘if ‘ — the results from our two teaspoons of soil are representative of all of Mars, or at least a significant portion of the planet.”
Continue reading ‘Phoenix Lander Finds Perchlorates in Soil’
MARS PHOENIX MISSION UPDATE
31 July 2008
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
With enticing results so far and the spacecraft in good shape, NASA also announced operational funding for the mission will extend through Sept. 30. The original prime mission of three months ends in late August. The mission extension adds five weeks to the 90 days of the prime mission.
“Phoenix is healthy and the projections for solar power look good, so we want to take full advantage of having this resource in one of the most interesting locations on Mars,” said Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Continue reading ‘Tastes Like Chicken Broth?’
PHOENIX MISSION UPDATE
24 July 2008
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has groomed the bottom of a shallow trench to prepare for collecting a sample to be analyzed from a hard subsurface layer where the soil may contain frozen water.
Images received Thursday morning confirmed that the lander’s robotic arm had scraped the top of the hard layer clean during activities of Phoenix’s 58th Martian day, or sol, corresponding to overnight Wednesday to Thursday.
The Phoenix team developed commands for sending to the spacecraft Thursday to complete two remaining preparations necessary before collecting a sample and delivering it to the lander’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA). One part of the plan for Sol 59 (overnight Thursday to Friday) would assure that the scoop is empty of any soil collected earlier. Another would complete a final cleaning of any volatile materials from the oven that will receive the sample.
In the past two weeks, the team has refined techniques for using a powered rasp on the back of the arm’s scoop to cut and collect shavings of material from the bottom of the trench. The trench, informally named “Snow White,” is 4 to 5 centimeters deep (about 2 inches), about 23 centimeters wide (9 inches), and about 60 centimeters long (24 inches) long.
Continue reading ‘Trench on Mars Ready for Next Sampling by NASA Lander’
PHOENIX MISSION UPDATE
TUCSON, Ariz. – Phoenix early Tuesday finished its longest work shift of the mission. The lander stayed awake for 33 hours, completing tasks that included rasping and scraping by the robotic arm, in addition to atmosphere observations in coordination with simultaneous observations by NASA’sMars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“Our rasping test yesterday gave us enough confidence that we’re now planning for the next use of the rasp to be for acquiring a sample to be delivered to TEGA,” said Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. TEGA is Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, an instrument that heats samples in small ovens and uses a mass spectrometer to study the vapors driven off by the heating.
As preparation for that sample delivery in coming days, the Phoenix team developed plans to command the lander Tuesday evening to conduct 80 scrapings of the bottom of a trench informally named “Snow White.” The scraping is designed to freshly expose frozen material and ready the surface for using the rasp.
Picture caption: This animation combines two images of the trench informally named “Snow White” taken by the Surface Stereo Imager. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University
PHOENIX MISSION UPDATE
18 July 2008
TUCSON, Ariz. — The team operating NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander plans to tell the lander today to do a second, larger test of using a motorized rasp to produce and gather shavings of frozen ground.
The planned test is a preparation for putting a similar sample into one of Phoenix’s laboratory ovens in coming days. The instrument with the oven, the Thermal and Evolved- Gas Analyzer (TEGA), will be used to check whether the hard layer exposed in a shallow trench is indeed rich in water ice, as scientists expect, and to identify some other ingredients in the frozen soil.
The rasp flings some of the shavings that it produces directly into an opening on the back of the scoop at the end of the lander’s robotic arm. The test planned for today differs in several ways from the first test of the rasp on Mars, on July 15.
“First, we will scrape the terrain before rasping, to expose fresh terrain for sampling,” said Richard Volpe of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., an engineer for the Phoenix robotic arm team. “Second, we will rasp four times in a row, twice the amount previously. Third, the scoop blade will be run across the rasp holes to pick up as much of the tailings as possible.”
Continue reading ‘NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander Continues Tests with Rasp’
In an odd bit of timing, scientists are asking the public for help with finding a polar lander that disappeared at Mars eight years ago just as NASA is attempting to land a similar spacecraft on the planet’s pole.
Scientists at the University of Arizona have released high-resolution images of the landing area where the Mars Polar Lander was to have touched down on December 3, 1999. NASA lost contact with the spacecraft after it entered the atmosphere; officials believe the lander smashed into the planet at high speed because of a design flaw in its landing system.
The loss of the spacecraft was the low-point of NASA’s otherwise highly successful effort to explore the Red Planet. Ten weeks earlier, the agency had lost the Mars Climate Orbiter as it was attempting a tricky aerobraking maneuver in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Investigators found that both metric and Imperial units were used in control software, causing the orbiter to burn up in the atmosphere.
The search for the missing lander comes as NASA is preparing to place its Mars Phoenix Lander at the north pole on May 25. The spacecraft, which was proposed by the University of Arizona, makes use of several backup instruments built for the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander program. The main lander was originally built for a 2001 mission that NASA canceled in the wake of its twin failures in 1999.
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS RELEASE
We’ve all heard about the space missions that are DOA when NASA engineers lose touch with the spacecraft or lander. In other cases, some critical system fails and the mission is compromised.
Both are maddening scenarios because the spacecraft probably could be easily fixed if engineers could just get their hands on the hardware for a few minutes.
Ali Akoglu and his students at The University of Arizona are working on hybrid hardware/software systems that one day might use machine intelligence to allow the spacecraft to heal themselves.
Akoglu, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is using Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGA, to build these self-healing systems. FPGAs combine software and hardware to produce flexible systems that can be reconfigured at the chip level.
Continue reading ‘Spacecraft: Heal Thyself’
The Arizona Daily Wildcat has published an editorial praising the university’s participation in the Google Lunar X Prize. The paper believes the combination of UA’s imaging experience, Raytheon’s missile technology, and Carnegie Mellon robotics expertise makes this a very strong entry in the competition to land a rover on the lunar surface.
“Private exploration is lighter, leaner and smarter than lumbering government projects, and we’re glad the UA is playing an important role in the future of space exploration. Google may be paying for the prize, and the UA may be a formidable competitor, but it’s humans everywhere who will reap its rewards,” the editors write.