* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: The Phoenix lander

Blobrana · L

The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the "potential for life" on Mars, scientists tell Aviation Week & Space Technology.
Sources say the new data do not indicate the discovery of existing or past life on Mars. Rather the data relate to habitability--the "potential" for Mars to support life--at the Phoenix arctic landing site, sources say.

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Blobrana · L

A full-circle, colour panorama of Phoenix's surroundings also has been completed by the spacecraft.

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Credit NASA

"The details and patterns we see in the ground show an ice-dominated terrain as far as the eye can see. They help us plan measurements we're making within reach of the robotic arm and interpret those measurements on a wider scale" - Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, lead scientist for Phoenix's Surface Stereo Imager camera.

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Blobrana · L

NASA scientists said on Thursday they had definitive proof that water exists on Mars after tests on ice found on the planet in June by the Phoenix Mars Lander.

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Blobrana · L

Cracks appear in ice under Mars lander
Some as long as 4 inches have appeared in Snow Queen feature
A surface feature thought to be ice beneath NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander visibly changed sometime between mid-June and mid-July, close-up images show.
Phoenix's robotic arm camera took the first close-up image of the hard feature, dubbed Snow Queen, on May 31, six Martian days (called sols) after the craft landed. The $420 million dollar mission is digging up and testing samples of Martian dirt and ice to see if the red planet might have been habitable at some point in the past.

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Blobrana · L

A sample of icy soil collected by the robotic arm of NASA's Phoenix Mars lander is apparently stuck in its scoop.
The Lander's robotic arm will use a revised collection-and-delivery sequence overnight Sunday with the goal of depositing an icy soil sample in the lander's oven.

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Blobrana · L

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's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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Blobrana · L

To coordinate with observations made by an orbiter flying repeatedly overhead, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is working a schedule Monday that includes staying awake all night for the first time.
Phoenix is using its weather station, stereo camera and conductivity probe to monitor changes in the lower atmosphere and ground surface at the same time NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter studies the atmosphere and ground from above.

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Blobrana · L

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 Analyser (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.

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Blobrana · L

Martian Surface as Seen by Phoenix

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA/Lockheed Martin

This colourglyph, acquired by NASA's Phoenix Lander's Surface Stereo Imager on Sol 8, the eighth Martian day of the mission (June 2, 2008), shows a stereoscopic 3D view of the Martian surface near the lander. This area is part of Phoenix's workplace and is informally called "Wonderland."

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