After getting the scoop of a lifetime last week – finding ice – Phoenix is now ready to start doing some experiments of the chemical kind (press release).

This is the first ever chemistry experiment to be done on polar Martian soil. But I don’t think Phoenix will be using pipettes and test tubes, or even a Bunsen burner.

Phoenix’s lab is called MECA (microscopy, electrochemistry and conductivity analyzer) and will be able to test the Martian soil’s acidity and salt content, and the instrument can also check out the different isotopes of elements present, and work out if there are any organics there.

So far, Phoenix has been digging and baking – but this foray into chemistry is a pretty exciting step forward in working out what it is really like up there.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 12:08 PM | Permalink

From the editors: Mars Phoenix scientists have finally confirmed finding ice at the landing site (watch the chunks sublimating in the lower left of the trench in the animated image below). Read our full story here. And for more on a new study about how volcanism and ice may have shaped Mars's northern regions, try this news story.

Posted by Alex Witze at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Phoenix mission scientists just won't call it ice. It's getting almost hilarious the way they assiduously avoid the term. On a conference call today, Ray Arvidson, the robotic arm lead scientist, talked about some of the features of a deep 5 to 7 centimeter trench. The trench combines "Goldilocks" and "Dodo" -- two shallower test trenches. You can see the ledge of exposed "light-toned" (as they call it) material in the upper part of the trench. You can also see a little tiny nugget of something -- don't say that word -- sitting just to the left of center in the trench.
So the team is going to watch what happens to these two features over time. The chunk, being small and exposed, would be expected to sublime and disappear over time. And the ledge, if it was an extension of the cold, thick ice table below, might actually be expected to accumulate frost. We'll see.
Bill Boyton, lede for the TEGA instrument, said the baking is going well -- they've performed two step-wise bakes, up to 175 degrees Celsius, without detecting anything other than carbon dioxide. In the next few days, he'll amp that oven up to 1000 degrees Celsius. That's when things will really start cooking.

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:32 PM | Permalink

After five days of shaking, TEGA will finally get around to some baking. Last Friday, the robotic arm dropped some soil onto the screen door of one of the ovens for TEGA, Phoenix's main chemical analysis instrument. But the soil was apparently too clumpy. Mission scientists sent commands to vibrate the instrument, which resulted in some material getting through the screen (see the animated gif here). But somehow it wasn't getting into the oven. Today, something finally gave -- was it the weather? was it the vibrating? -- and the oven is now full. Now they've got to worry about contamination.
For future TEGA tests, the team is experimenting with a new “sprinkle” test. Instead of burying the TEGA door in one big dump, the team may angle the scoop, and then run the ice rasp at its back – vibrating the scoop enough to send a fine stream of soil particles over the edge.

Posted by Eric Hand at 10:39 PM | Permalink

Is Phoenix, and one of its premier instruments, TEGA, covered in too much microscopic crud from Earth to detect Martian organics? That's the question I try to explore in my latest story on the main Nature news site. TEGA, pictured on the right, is about to begin baking soil samples and sniffing the gases that come off it in the hopes of detecting organic molecules. But whether the TEGA team can say anything definitive will depend on how free the instrument is of Earth organics. Yesterday, Phoenix had its scoop poised at the edge of one of TEGA's eight oven doors, and today, it was going to let the soil dribble through TEGA's sieve.
New Scientist reporter (and former Nature intern) Ewen Callaway has an excellent story on a related issue: Are Earth microbes so hardy that they could survive on Mars? A JPL microbiologist found a lot more bugs than you might think living in supposedly clean assembly rooms. And while great care was taken with the robotic arm, wrapping it in a biological barrier, there are other parts of the spacecraft that were not kept as clean. What about the lander feet? They don't interact with the soil as much as the robotic arm, but they could easily have landed directly on ice. Is an antiseptic wipe down before launch enough?

Posted by Eric Hand at 08:06 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, Mars Odyssey failed to send Phoenix instructions for the day -- and so engineers have switched back to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the go-to relay link.
This is the second time that Phoenix has lost a day due to a balky communications link. When it happens, Phoenix still stays reasonably busy, following "run-out" instructions that tell it to take panoramic pictures. But it isn' t what the scientists want to be doing. Yestersol (sorry, hooked on the term), Phoenix was supposed to move its first soil sample to the edge of TEGA's maw. That's going to happen today, assuming the MRO uplink works. Tomorrow Phoenix will tilt the scoop and drop the soil in. And so on, day by day.
The team is prepared for the slow work -- even budgeting for down days like yestersol. JPL flight systems engineer Chris Lewicki says that the team should accomplish all its science goals even if 30 of the mission's 90 days are lost to the unforseen.
The press conference focused on some of the first optical microscope pictures in MECA. Some really cool images of three grains, likely kicked up during the landing, can be found here. MECA lead scientist Michael Hecht said these pictures had 10 times better resolution than microscopic pictures from the Mars rovers. That's a nice superlative: The tiniest things ever seen on Mars.

Posted by Eric Hand at 08:22 PM | Permalink

Also in this week's Nature, we did something unusual: a "snapshot feature." Some of our editors were so taken by the photo of Phoenix descending in front of Heimdall crater that they carved out two full pages in our features section, usually reserved for longer, analytical stories.
If there's ever a time to pilfer the copy of Nature from the departmental common room, then this week is it. Heck, I'd pay money for a nice glossy poster. The folks at Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter should seriously start selling prints of this -- maybe they can pay for the cost overruns on Mars Science Laboratory.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:47 PM | Permalink

I have a new story up on the main Nature News site about the mystery of the polygons on Mars, which are analogous to the polygons found in the Arctic and Antarctic on Earth. Mike Mellon thought he had them all figured out -- he had a model that perfectly explained the five meter polygons he was seeing from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRise camera (pictured here). Then Phoenix landed and they were too small. Strangely, Mellon also sees the faint imprint of really large polygons, maybe more than 20 meters across. One idea is that each polygon size reflects the freezing mechanics of a different climatic epoch. The most prominent polygons reflect the active climate, while the receding ones are the half-erased remnants of climates of yestersol (a Mars-mad neologism that I heard a JPL engineer use yesterday). The surface of Mars would therefore be a palimpsest (perhaps my favorite word in the English language).

Posted by Eric Hand at 02:49 PM | Permalink

No, that isn’t Phoenix PI Peter Smith. And that’s not the Surface Stereo Imager.
That's a decade old picture of David Paige, PI for the doomed Mars Polar Lander, with the previous incarnation of the SSI.
On one of the recent Phoenix conference calls, a journalist asked -- had anyone talked to Paige? Did he watch the landing? Good questions. I called him up -- he’s a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles -- and had a quick chat. Turns out he did watch the Phoenix landing from JPL, with his 5-year-old son.
First, the background. Mars Polar Lander was headed to the south pole to perform a similar mission as Phoenix, but was lost upon entry to the atmosphere in 1999. Its failure led to the cancellation and closeting of the parts that were going into the Mars Surveyor lander -- and it was those parts that were resurrected to make Phoenix.
Paige recalled the tense moments of his landing operation, which also occurred at JPL. It was a low budget operation, and Polar Lander didn’t have direct telemetry to Earth during its descent. From the time it left the cruise stage, until it touched down and started beaming signals back to Earth 20 minutes later, mission managers had to wait in silence.
Paige recalled the silence persisting after 20 minutes. And persisting. That began weeks of fruitless searches for any signal that Polar Lander was alive. Its wreckage (though it might not have crashed) still hasn’t been found. Instead of seven minutes of terror, Paige had months of anxiety, followed by years of disappointment. “We’ll get closure eventually,” he says. “It’s like the lost relative that went on the hiking trip and never came back. And you never found the body.”
“We came very, very close to doing something unique. You can’t help but wonder what we might have discovered…” he says, trailing off.
But he’s not feeling bitter by the success of Phoenix. Bittersweet, maybe. It brings back difficult memories, but he’s not jealous. “They deserve success and so far it looks like they’re getting it.”
He also puts a positive spin on the failure of Polar Lander, saying it was necessary in order for Phoenix to succeed. The Phoenix team scoured the old Surveyor parts relentlessly, and identified and eliminated failure modes.
After several months of searching for Polar Lander, Paige sent an email to his team, saying it was time to call off the mission. Paige didn’t drop off the face of the Earth, but he did decide not to get involved with Phoenix. Five years down the drain was a lot, but not his whole career. He’s now a PI for a thermal mapping instrument on the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. “There are always more chances. It’s not the end of the world,” he says. “No mission is the last mission to Mars.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:54 PM | Permalink

Proof that life can survive on Mars.

Posted by Eric Hand at 08:17 PM | Permalink

Phoenix's robotic arm has scooped up its first mouthful of Martian soil, mission scientists announced today. In a test "dig and dump" area to the west of the "National Parks" that are off limits for now, the robotic arm easily slid into the soil. The color picture here, taken with the LEDs of the robotic arm camera, gives a good sense of the crumbly, crusty overburden that the team will be digging through to get to the ice that they're pretty sure lurks just below.
In fact, they might have reached it already. If you look really carefully at the picture, a quarter of the way from the right, you can see what appears to be filigrees of frost. Robotic arm lead Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, said the white stuff could also be a water-borne magnesium sulfate salt.
In other news, PI Peter Smith said that a back up filament -- used to ionize the gases coming off baked soil samples -- should work as well as the primary filament, which is suffering from an electrical short circuit. Smith said the team plans to dump their first soil samples into the one of the ovens either tomorrow or the next day.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:58 PM | Permalink

Phoenix PI Peter Smith can finally rest easy: There really is ice underneath the lander.
A followup to images from two days ago has found a smooth bright tabular substance that, to my wide eyes, can't be anything other than solid H2O. You can see, at the top of the photo, the thruster nozzles that blew the soil away to reveal this ice.
"The consensus opinion is that we have found ice very close beneath the surface at our landing site," Smith said today in a conference call. If you look at the image, you can see shadows from the lander legs that change angle right at the edge of ice, an indication that the ice sits below "four to six" inches of soil, according to Smith.
Today the lander is moving the robotic arm camera closer to the first patch of ice it found two days ago -- an area that has been dubbed "Holy Cow". Not a name that's part of the Humpty Dumpty story, merely the first words out of Smith's mouth. The robotic arm camera should be able to use its LED lights and get some color photos of this ice -- good fodder for discussion in the coming days.
If you're wondering why the University of Arizona's Phoenix web page is down, Smith said that the Web site was hacked. "There was an amateurish attempt to delete some of our material," he said, adding that it should be back up this afternoon.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Phoenix scientists may have taken their first glimpse of Martian ice. In order to see underneath the lander -- an area likely blasted free of thin soil by the landing retrorockets -- missions scientists had to use the camera on the end of the robotic arm. A picture returned last night shows a series of three tabular surfaces (upper middle in the image here). “They could be exposures of ice, or they could be exposures of rock,” said Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and lead for the robotic arm, at today's press conference. “What we have is what you see.”
Today, the robotic arm camera was instructed to get closer to the surface in order to take color pictures.
The bad news today is that the TEGA instrument, which will bake soil and sniff for organic molecules, has a problem with its mass spectrometer. One of the filaments that ionizes the gas coming off the baked soil appears to have a short circuit, says the University of Arizona’s Bill Boynton, lead for the TEGA instrument. But he said that a second filament should still be able to do a decent job analysing samples, if the short circuit remains a problem.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:00 PM | Permalink

Between my last post and this one, I've traveled on a plane from Tucson back to Washington, DC. My jet lag will be opposite to what the Phoenix scientists face. And my homecoming, unlike Peter Smith's, means that I will be devoting less, not more, time to Phoenix. But my posts won't stop, they'll just be sluggish, as if I've got dust on my solar arrays.
I'm pleased that Nature sent me to cover the landing, but the magazine will be far more interested in the the scientific discoveries that are going to emerge. I've saved a few things to write for the magazine, so stay tuned!

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:14 AM | Permalink

The Mars Odyssey orbiter is going to be Phoenix's twice-a-day radio link until engineers figure out what happened to the UHF radio on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Phoenix team announced this morning at a press conference here in Tucson. As I reported yesterday, MRO's did come back on before the afternoon's downlink, and so the Phoenix team was able to get some data down last night. But until they figure out what happened to MRO, Phoenix will use Odyssey. “This is a contingency that we have always planned for,” said JPL's Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager. He said he had no worries about Odyssey being a much older spacecraft than MRO, noting that it was built the same time as Phoenix itself.
Also at the press conference, Mark Lemmon, Surface Stereo Imager lead, discussed what I tried to explain in my post this morning – how the SSI uses stereo vision to get depth perception, which allows for the determination of heights. He released a cool graphic of the digital elevation model that SSI has built up so far in the north workspace – the areas reachable by the robotic arm. Reds are low lying areas, the other colors are higher. So you can see that the arm has great access to a polygon directly in front.
“The red swath you see at the 10 and 11 o'clock postion is a trough between a polygon,” Lemmon said. "The yellows and greens and blues are the polygons themselves.”
The team has already started to divvy up the workspace. The area to the left of the robotic arm in the image is going to be used for digging and dumping. The high ground in yellow -- nicknamed “Humpty Dumpty” -- is going to be the start of a trench that will be dug from out to in, from the center of the polygon and across a trough. (Transects like this are really useful, as any geologist will tell you.)
Just to the right of Humpty Dumpty is a low trough area being called “Sleepy Hollow.” The arm will dig another trench there, but along the axis of the trough. Other areas have been preserved for the spiky electrical conductivity instrument. The robotic arm will have to dodge rocks that are already being given names such as “King's Men” and “Headless.”
It will be fun to watch these names enter the Martian lexicon, as the stories that lie beneath these little patches of ground unfold.

Posted by Eric Hand at 06:40 PM | Permalink

Right now the activities of the Surface Stereo Imager, or SSI, seem a bit mundane -- documentary pictures of the robotic arm, bland portraits of dust-free solar arrays -- but make no mistake: The SSI is like an orchestra's conductor, integral to the sweet scientific music that the Phoenix team hopes to make with the other instruments.
The key is that the SSI has two eyes, which give it depth perception. As it takes its panoramic shots, it is also building an elevation model. The model has already allowed mission scientists to spot several polygons, and has shown that one of the polygonal troughs sits within digging reach.
Knowing the precise 3-D terrain also will allow the robotic arm to move with confidence and efficiency. If the arm were to rely on its own single-eyed vision (there's a camera just above the scoop), it would use shadows for depth perception and move slowly and tentatively, wary of ramming into something.
“The arm is kind of dumb,” says Phoenix PI Peter Smith. “It has to be told where to go.” Adds Mark Lemmon, lead scientist for the SSI: “It lets us know our coordinates easily rather than painfully.”
But the SSI won't be totally left out of the science. It's already taking daily pictures of the telltale on the weather mast to gauge windspeeds. And Lemmon told me about two other exciting long-term experiments.
One will involve watching ice melt sublime. After using the scoop to dig a double-wide trench, a swath of ice will be exposed to the summer sun. The SSI will sit back and watch the surface recede until it reaches equilibrium. Knowing the precise shape of the ice surface over time (as well as temperatures and amount of sunshine) will allow the team to back out key parameters for the ice that have long been assumed in modeling the way ice grows and recedes on Mars.
A second experiment would recycle the “trash” of other experiments. As the scoop excavates, it needs to dump dirt somewhere. Some scientists would make these middens useful. They want to build a big dirt pile (using the cone-like shape of the pile to learn something about the size distribution of the soil particles) . Then, every day, the SSI would take a picture of the pile, watching it change in size and shape as the wind does it work -- it would thus constrain models for the wind-driven processes on Mars.
Image: University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In the toilets at the Science Operations Center, there are bags containing vials and plastic jugs. A sign above the bags warns: “Do not throw these away!”
It is part of an experiment within an experiment. Phoenix scientists are going to sample Mars' ice; Walter Sipes is going to sample the Phoenix scientists' urine -- as a way of assessing their body clocks.
Sipes, a NASA psychologist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, usually works with astronauts on the International Space Station, helping them adjust their body clocks when they suddenly need to perform a maneuver on, say, Moscow time.
Now he'll help the Phoenix scientists adjust to Mars time. They work through the night to have fresh instructions ready to relay to Phoenix before it starts its day. As deputy project scientist Deborah Bass puts it: “We do the Martian night shift. The lander works the day shift. It has it easy in that respect.”
Since the the Martian day is longer than Earth's by almost 40 minutes, the scientists have to come in a little later each day. The effect on their bodies is as if they are continually flying west across time zones, says Sipes.
Twenty scientists were recruited for the experiment. They will be given light boxes to put by their computer workstations. At specific times of the day, they are dosed with solid blue light which helps reset body clocks by triggering the production of melatonin.
Every four hours, the scientists are expected to collect some urine. Sipes and his colleagues will look for melatonin spikes. If the spikes shift along with Mars time, he'll know that the scientists are following his strict sleep and light regimen.
A final part of the experiment is to see if the effort is worthwhile. Every day, at the beginning and end of their shifts, the test subjects will take cognitive tests. Sipes says he didn't have enough money to do a control group. But he'll still be able to look for differences in cognitive test results between diligent subjects and the slackers who avoid the body clock regimen. He'll know who is being good and who is being naughty because the subjects wear special wristwatches that are sensitive to both motion and light; Sipes can thus tell if the scientists are in the dark and motionless (and, presumably, sleeping).
Bass hopes that the team will take Mars times somewhat seriously: “In the beginning you run on adrenaline. But you need to protect people from themselves.”

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick update: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter UHF radio is back on, and so the orbiter should be back in business as the go-to relay station for Phoenix. Mission scientists said that when the radio was turned back on this afternoon, it didn't "safe" itself and turn off immediately, as it did this morning just before it was supposed to upload Phoenix's chores for the day. MRO should be back in business for the afternoon's downlink that's supposed to be happening right now.
That means that the day isn't completely wasted. Even though Phoenix didn't have a complete set of instructions to perform today, it did have some back-up tasks it performed. So the scientists hope to have some new stuff: a full color image to the north, from the edge of the lander's workspace to the horizon, and also some weather data.

Later update: Missions scientists have confirmed that they were able to get some "great looking" pictures down today via MRO, and it looks like they are already up, posted here. Peter Smith should have something he can talk about at tomorrow's press conference (as long as HiRise doesn't steal the show again).

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:37 AM | Permalink

The big (and first bad) news coming out of the press conference this morning is that the UHF radio link on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was shut down before it sent Phoenix its workday instructions for sol two on Mars. That means that all of the lander's planned activities for today -- tentative first motions of the robotic arm, the filling in of panoramic blank spots -- will be delayed by a day.
Jet Propulsion Lab managers seemed confident it was just a temporary set back. JPL Mars Exploration Program manager Fuk Li said the radio shut down was triggered by a “transient event,” perhaps something like a blast of cosmic ray particles. In those situations, MRO pre-emptively shuts the instrument down as a safety precaution. Engineers are trying to turn it back on right now.
If the problem persists, mission managers can switch to the UHF radio on Mars Odyssey (which is going to be used for half of the uplinks and downlinks anyway). There's also a backup UHF radio on MRO.
But this is still a minor setback right when the scientists wanted to charge out of the gate. Li said MRO had turned on its radio roughly 100 times for practice without experiencing any problems. Ed Sedivy, Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin, said, “All this is is a one day hiccup for Peter,” he said.
Phoenix PI Peter Smith still had plenty to be excited about in the first pictures, retrieved last night, of the workspace -- the area within digging reach of the robotic arm. “There's just a wonderful buffet of opportunities in front of us,” he said.
His team has spied a trough in one corner of the field of view, which he says is one of the depressions forming the boundary between the polygons that represent expansion and contraction cycles of the ice below. Smith wants to dig a trench across the trough next week, but first has to calibrate the robotic arm with practice motions and tentative first touches of the soil. There will be no digging in the troughs for now. “Those were designated National Parks last night,” Smith said.

Posted by Eric Hand at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By the way, among the pictures retrieved from the first sol on Mars were the first data from the weather station. The weather report: highs of -30 degrees Celsius, lows of -80 degrees, and winds gusting up to 20 kilometers per hour from the northeast.
The wind speeds were based on photos of the telltale, though they don't know if the pictures they have reflect gusts or swirls. But Phoenix PI Peter Smith says he's not worried about dust accumulating on the solar arrays. As with the Mars rovers, he will rely on periodic dust devils to sweep them free. “These dust devils are so efficient, we thought we'd use the same method,” he says.
And if you're not happy with the weather wherever you are, you can remind yourself how good you've got it by downloading a daily Mars weather widget for your Mac. (I myself am going to miss the perfect 30 degree Celsius days here in Tucson.)

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:00 PM | Permalink

As amazing as the pic was of Phoenix in mid-descent, 20 seconds after its parachute deployed, the backdrop might be more specatcular. Alfred McEwen, PI for the HiRise camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, zoomed out to find Heimdall crater looming 20 kilometers in the background. "This really give you an idea of how small Phoenix is in relation to Mars," he said at a press conference Tuesday morning here in Tucson.
The second picture shows another HiRise photo, 22 hours later, catching Phoenix sitting in its rock-less sea, with its solar arrays unfurled. Much of what Phoenix sits on is impact material ejected from Heimdall. McEwen doesn't yet understand why bigger rocks are seen inside Heimdall, but so few are found by Phoenix. "Why that is is a mystery right now," he says, adding that it's possible that wind has deposited finer material since the Heimdall impact.

Images: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 08:35 PM | Permalink

With Phoenix working in its second full day on Mars, it seems as if much of the media has stopped caring. C'mon folks -- the landing is just the beginning. Now comes the good stuff.

Emily Lakdawalla over at the Planetary Society will still be blogging away, I'm sure. She recently did some photostitching herseslf, layering several filtered images to show off the society's "Vision of Mars" project.

Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides at Wired has a nice post about Phoenix PI Peter Smith and his wife wearing a piece of Mars in their wedding bands.

And my tireless colleague Daniel Cressey saw that the Phoenix Twitter feed is now more popular than... Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins? A dubious compliment.

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:43 PM | Permalink

The Phoenix team has posted a bunch of new photos tonight, after the first full day of operations on Mars. To the right is a photo of the telltale at the top of the weather mast, the tallest point on the lander.
It's a very similar photo to one I took a few days ago. Yet one telltale hangs in a comfortably air-conditioned room, and the other dangles in the airless, near vacuum of Mars.
I took my photo here in Tucson, in the Science Operations Center, pointing my camera at Phoenix's doppelganger. And scientists here in Tucson, in the Science Operations Center, told the real Phoenix to point its camera at the real telltale and take a snap. These two photos, so similar, are separated by a few pages of scrolling on this blog -- what, maybe 10,000 pixels or so? Yet think how far those Martian pixels had to travel to reach your eyes.
There's a feeling of synchronicity between everything that's going on here, and everything that's going on there. Peter Smith must know what this is like. Is he with the engineers in Pasadena? Or is he with the scientists in Tucson? He's like a diffracted photon, in both places at once, on perpetual video conference. Part of all this doubling is intentional and necessary. The scientists rehearse and simulate to avoid catastrophe. But the simultaneity is a strange feeling.
And it is demonstrably false. In the build up to the 4:53 pm Pacific Daylight Time landing on Sunday, hundreds of people had gathered in the operations center to stare at video screens. Clocks were counting down, and blips of light, signifying the spacecraft's radio signal, were marching in an arc across the screen. I was standing towards the back of the room with John Moores, a loose-limbed graduate student of Peter Smith's. He glanced down at his watch. “I've got 38 minutes past the hour,” he said. “So what's happened has happened.”
It takes 15 minutes for radio signals to travel from Mars to Earth. What was done was done. Phoenix had either landed, or it hadn't, and there we were, playing make believe that something was still to come.
Make believe. NASA is incredibly good at what it does -- sending actual spacecraft to other worlds. But it has also come to rival Pixar in its ability to render simulations. This was the first landing I've witnessed this close. Before this, my impressions of space landings were informed by movies and documentaries that portrayed a previous era of exploration: Mission control engineers with slide rules who updated spacecraft trajectories by hand with pushpins. The momentousness of the occasion could expand within the imagination of my mind.
But just hours after this landing, NASA had spliced together a cinematic montage, cutting between the nervousness and exultation in JPL's control room, and a rendered simulation of what Phoenix was supposed to be doing at those same moments.
I don't mean to be critical. The simulations are beautiful, and explanatory to boot. But I'm not sure if they help me believe. I'm more affected by that stark, lonely photo of the meteorological mast. It is the tallest thing for miles in that alien world. It is really there, and the Phoenix mission is really happening. On Mars.

Posted by Eric Hand at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Immediately after finishing the press conference at JPL this morning, Phoenix PI Peter Smith rushed over to LAX and hopped on United Express flight 6498 to Tucson. Arriving at 3:30 pm, he hopped in a car and worked his way over to the Science Operations Center. A crowd of about 50 scientists and reporters -- and even the mayor of Tucson -- were waiting.
“This is sort of like when our basketball team wins a championship,” said Bill Boynton, the PI for the TEGA instrument, which will bake samples and look for organics. Smith gave out hugs and handshakes as the crowd sang, 'For he's a jolly good Martian.'
Smith patiently answered the TV reporters' questions for the umpteenth time: “How do you feel? What does this mean? Will you find life on Mars?”
He really is a jolly fellow. There's something about that silvery hair -- or maybe it's the mustache and soul patch -- that adds to the mystique. He could have a long career as a Santa Claus if he ever runs out of planetary science to do.

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:41 AM | Permalink

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has snapped a stunning picture of Phoenix, in the act of descending, with its high-resolution (HiRise) instrument, mission scientists announced at a press conference Monday morning at JPL in California. “This is a spectacular image, this is an engineer's delight,” said Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein. “I was very skeptical that this was possible.”
Goldstein didn't know exactly the stage Phoenix was at when the photo was taken, but said it must have occurred after the parachute opened 10 kilometers above the surface, and before it was ejected at one kilometer before landing.
The picture was taken during the martian day, with the sun almost directly to the rear of MRO. MRO was orbiting at an altitude of 300 kilometers, but Phoenix was 760 kilometers away. It was because of this oblique view – MRO looking through miles and miles of hazy atmosphere – that the surface appears dark, fuzzy and streaky, said HiRise PI Alfred McEwen in Tucson. But the white of the parachute, lander backshell, and cords connecting the two was plenty bright enough for HiRise to detect. “Seeing the cords connecting the two, it's completely unambiguous,” McEwen said.
McEwen said the decision to try and take the snap – with an estimated 80% chance of success – was fairly last-minute, incorporated into plans only in the last few weeks. “They were very hesitant to do anything new, because they perceived it as risk,” he said. The imperative was MRO's UHF radio link to Phoenix, so engineers didn't want any other instruments on the orbiter, such as HiRise, causing potential electromagnetic interference.
But in the end, the potential for a successful snap to document a failed landing was too important. A deployed parachute in a bad landing would mean that the fault lay elsewhere. “That was the argument that won the day,” McEwen said.
McEwen said another set of HiRise photos, taken today of the surface, appear to show some parts of the landing site. McEwen said his team thinks they have spotted the parachute and the backshell, but not yet the lander itself.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Humans, with their instinct to memorialize, have always been stashing artefacts into time capsules, whether those vessels be mausolea or rocket ships.
The latest instance of this is “Visions of Mars,” a mini-DVD that the Planetary Society stuck to the edge of Phoenix's instrument bed. Dubbed the “first library on Mars,” the disc contains a collection of art, literature and audio tracks, along with a list of hundreds of thousands of names of enthusiasts. "We hope astronauts will one day retrieve this first Martian library and enjoy the visionary works and good wishes sent from our time to theirs," said society director Louis Friedman in a statement.
It is the society's second attempt to get the collection to Mars – an earlier version was on board Russia's Mars '96 spacecraft, which failed just after launch.
The DVD contains short stories from authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, audio clips from Carl Sagan, and artwork such as the promo poster to this 1936 Flash Gordon flick.
You can see who signed up to put their name on board here. I found a George W. Bush and a Barack Obama, but no Hillary Clinton or John McCain. Maybe Obama is more of a Mars fan after all.

Image: Universal Pictures

Posted by Eric Hand at 06:24 PM | Permalink

Phoenix mission managers Sunday night recounted a successful landing and took comfort in the apparent good health of their lander. The dais at the JPL press conference was full of contented faces -- with the exception of NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who, as usual, looked a bit grumpy. But inside, you knew Griffin was beaming. He complimented the mission team, saying that “experts make it look easy.”
The first images that Phoenix retrieved were primarily of itself. The main camera, the weather mast, and the biological sheath that enclosed the robotic arm all deployed safely. The solar arrays also unfolded correctly, and were gathering power, with little to no dust visible on them.
Project Manager Barry Goldstein said that Phoenix landed southeast of where it was supposed to land, perhaps because the parachute was several seconds late in detaching from the lander. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would begin looking for Phoenix's precise location in the next day.
But the drift didn't really matter. Mission PI Peter Smith said the only thing surprising about the landing site was how unsurprising it is. The first low-resolution pictures of the landscape show the expected polygonal patterns – signs that the freeze-thaw cycles of ice have operated just beneath the soil – stretching all the way to the horizon. Smith hopes that the robotic arm will be able to reach the dark colored troughs. “We don't need wheels on this lander,” he said. “The [polygon] we're sitting on is just as good as the one on the horizon.”
Phoenix scientists will spend the next few days doing diagnostics on the instruments, getting good estimates of the solar power at their disposal, and calibrating the robotic arm for the motions it will be making. Digging for samples would not begin for about a week, Smith said.
At the right is one of the first (approximate) color images released.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Odyssey came overhead at 6:45 Pacific time for its second pass, and Phoenix has successfully sent its first pictures back to Earth. The solar arrays have deployed, the biological barrier covering the robotic arm opened up, and pictures of the footpads show that they have landed on flat, solid ground. And the first landscapes! That's a bonus, pictures that were only going to be taken if everything else went well. Flat, polar vistas for as far as the eyes can see. I'll post one here as soon as they are available.
Later Update: Here's the first landscape shot, a screen grab from NASA TV.
Still Later Update: You can find all of the first pictures at Arizona's site. The wrap-up press conference for the evening is set to begin in about 15 minutes. We'll see what's in store for tomorrow.
Image: NASA TV

Posted by Eric Hand at 02:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

During the “seven minutes of terror,” the room was almost completely silent. Some of the mission scientists' friends and family were grinning, cracking jokes, full of elation and excitement. But the scientists sat either stonily or with worry writ large on their faces. Their livelihoods were at stake – this was no laughing matter. Here are some pictures in the moments before landing, of University of Colorado's Mike Mellon and Johnson Space Center's Dick Morris and, on the continuing page, project scientist Leslie Tamppari. What got me was when the voice from JPL mission control started calling out the altitudes after the lander got a radar lock on the surface. As soon as people realized it was decelerating, a few voices cut through the room: “Yes. Yes. Yes, Come on.”
Afterwards, Aaron Zent, from NASA Ames, stood by in his sandals, shorts and Hawaiian shirt, texting back friends, family and neighbors. “I thought I was being pretty cool. But after it landed, I realized that I had been sweating like a pig.” Zent had been a part of five failed Mars missions. “I was oh for five. So this is a novel experience for me.”

Continue reading "Phoenix landing: Post-vita" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I will be posting photos and some of the reactions from the landing here in a little bit, but I wanted to report some important news, courtesy Deborah Bass, deputy project scientist. Phoenix is tilted only a half degree from the horizontal. That means it didn't land on a rock. And it means that the solar arrays should be able to draw plenty of power from the sun.

Later Update: JPL has confirmed that Phoenix landed at a tilt of 0.3 degrees: essentially flat. Phoenix also landed along the correct east-west axis for its solar arrays. That means the thrusters were able to execute the "pirouette." JPL commentator Robert Shotwell just said that the mission now shifts to the the Science Operations Center here in Tucson. "Hopefully they're going to make the best of what we just gave them."

Posted by Eric Hand at 01:18 AM | Permalink

Here is the landing sequence that's set to begin in an hour, if you can decipher the NASA shorthand for times, distances and speed.

Image: Phoenix Mission, University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 11:46 PM | Permalink

Let's talk a bit about failures. It's on everyone's mind. It's damn tough to land on Mars.
But it appears as if a lot of the scientists and engineers are trying to keep hopes low. Here's an example of NASA lowering expectations. “The global success rate in getting to the surface of Mars is less than 50%,” said Doug McCuistion, Mars Exploration Program chief, at a press conference yesterday.
And that's true. Of the 11 spacecraft that got to the edge of Mars' atmosphere, only five reached the surface and survived for more than a few seconds. But all five of those successful missions were NASA run. The failures were all either Soviet or British (let's not speak of poor Beagle 2, pictured here in what it might have looked like after crashing).
For NASA attempts at landing on Mars, the success rate is five out of six. That's a much more respectable 83% success rate.
But the reason why everyone is worried is because the Phoenix lander is based on designs for the one NASA Mars landing that did fail, the Mars Polar Lander, which was lost above Mars in 1999. NASA had another lander, called Mars Surveyor lander, all set to go, based on the failed Polar lander architecture. Surveyor was canceled after the polar lander failure, and the parts were put into storage.
Phoenix IS that same spacecraft, albeit one that has been combed over for glitches, and spiffed up. It was rescued from the warehouse, and will, supposedly, rise from the ashes of the earlier failed and canceled missions. Thus the name. And thus the anxiety.
Even if the Phoenix team has ironed out all the software glitches, there is still much that can go wrong. Within the seven-minute atmospheric descent alone, 26 separate pyrotechnic events – little firecrackers that serve to separate, open or release spacecraft components – have to happen in succession, said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at JPL. Even if each popper has a 99% reliability, the risk of overall failure begins to stack up if each pyrotechnic is integral to the mission. (Think of the old Christmas tree lights, wired in series. When one goes, they all go.)
Once Phoenix touches down, its resilience will improve. Components can fail without the whole mission following suit. But until then, Goldstein will be nervous. “It doesn't matter how many times we land successfully or unsuccessfully on Mars, this is a jittery time,” says Goldstein.
For those who are counting, continue reading to see all of the Mars landing attempts, with their outcomes:
Image: Beagle 2

Continue reading "Phoenix landing: The anxiety of hope" »

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:56 PM | Permalink

In less than four hours, Phoenix will begin its final descent. And, at this point, there's nothing that mission scientists and engineers can do about it. “The rest of the day is watching and waiting,” said Phoenix PI Peter Smith at the final pre-landing press briefing from Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Mission engineers decided to forgo a final course correction. A lumpy mound of rocks sits a few kilometers to the northwest of the expected centerpoint of landing. But the chance of landing in the rocks is only 1%, and within the mound, the chance of settling on a rock is only 10%. So engineers didn't think the 1 in a 1000 risk of a rock was worth the risk of altering the trajectory.
The spacecraft has sidled up to Mars, accelerating from 6,300 mph this morning to 8,500 mph by the time of the press conference. By the start of entry this afternoon, just before 5 pm Pacific time, it will be moving at 12,700 mph.
“Today our spacecraft is starting to feel the pull of Martian gravity,” said Smith. “But I've been feeling the pull of Martian gravity for 15 years.”
After separation from its cruise stage, Phoenix will have to decelerate from 12,700 mph to zero – within seven minutes – using a combination of atmospheric friction, parachute, and thrusters. Phoenix will also lose its high bandpass signal to Deep Space Network antenna on Earth. Relying only on its battery powered radio, Phoenix will pump out a weak UHF signal that is likely to be picked up by both the Greenbank radio telescope in West Virginia and the Odyssey orbiter.
But it won't be until a second overhead pass from Odyssey, at 6:45 pm Pacific time, that Smith is expecting to get the first pictures that will provide proof of a safe landing and solar array deployment.
Smith said that from the spacecraft's perspective, Mars appears to be 10 times the size of the Moon from Earth. “It's growing rapidly in the sky, and my anticipation is growing just as rapidly.”

Image: Phoenix Mission, University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 09:13 PM | Permalink

Just a little over five hours before this starts to happen. The last press briefing begins at noon Pacific time -- so I'm heading over to the Science Operations Center now for that.

Image: Phoenix Mission, University of Arizona

Posted by Eric Hand at 07:14 PM | Permalink

One of my editors, Oliver Morton, pointed me to this article -- a business magazine story about IT demands on NASA. According to the story, NASA only recently became equipped to deal with the public's demands for fresh mission images. As of 2002, the NASA Web site was being operated by a single server in a basement.
It was really the 2004 landings of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity -- the first Mars landing in the modern internet age -- that forced NASA to dramatically ramp up its Web infrastructure. That year, there were 60 million unique visitors, and 330 terabytes of rover data were served to the public, the story says. Now NASA IT managers are expecting perhaps twice as much demand. You can even watch Phoenix land within Second Life.
And Ray Arvidson, pictured here, has seen this Internet arc firsthand. At this point, he has spent more time on Mars as a mission scientist than anyone else, serving on the Viking and rover missions as well as Phoenix. As the deputy PI for the rovers, he watched as their daily trundlings, disseminated via the Internet, captivated the public.
He finds all the changes staggering when he thinks back to the Viking missions in the 1970s. “We didn't have PCs, we didn't have Macs,” he says. “We did everything on paper.”
Calculators were still big, boxy and expensive. Instruction sequences for the landers were written out by hand. Returned images were printed out on film for viewing since color computer monitors didn't really exist.
I told Ray that he seems to be a bit calmer than everyone else. Maybe it's because he's seen it all. “It's been a total cool ride,” he says.

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:03 PM | Permalink

Okay, Phoenix people, I need your attention. I don't care how demanding your job is, how monotonous it is, or how little sleep you're getting. You just need to shut up and kowtow before your project scientist,