Left: Solar Array Being Deployed
Right: Lander Leg

There I was with my eyes glued to the Science Channel, waiting to see if the Phoenix Mars Lander was going to be successful. I knew that the lander was going to use rockets to slow down it's descent and land and this hadn't been done since the 1970s, according to NASA. As I watched the control room I could see scientists and engineers practically exploding with anticipation. These people were genuinely worried and why not, the lander had to do some fancy maneuvers, just to get into the correct position for landing and then all twelve of it's rockets have to all fire and fire practically at the same time. One scientist commented that if one rocket didn't fire, the rest would take the lander right to it's crash site. I think that I got the point. Why were these people so worried about this mission? One of the reasons was that some of them had been working on parts of it for over ten years. Think of it this way, in some positions ten years is half of a person's career. Even if it wasn't half of a career, it was a mighty long time to work on a project. Can you imagine how you would feel, if after all this time your work went down the drain because of a crash or malfunction?

One of the major problems with launching the Phoenix was that it takes about fifteen minutes to send a command and receive an answer at the distance that Mars is at. There was no direct control to pilot this lander down to the surface. Everything on the lander that had to do with landing, had to be preprogrammed, the part of it where it got near Mar's atmosphere anyway. I watched as the project director and others waited as the lander entered the blackout phase. That is where it is in the atmosphere and no data is received for over seven minutes. At this point everyone concerned is turning blue from holding their breath. The project director did the only thing that he could do at the moment. He passed the yellow bowl around with the peanuts in it. Passing peanuts around before a landing has become a good luck tradition at JPL. JPL is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they manage the landings and much of the flight. Some of the engineers and scientists looked to be at the end of their careers. I say this because of their age, a failure would have really hurt these people.

Color Photo Of Area Around Lander (False Color)

As we all know by now, the lander succeeded in making a great landing, but that was only part of the worry. The other thing that everyone was worried about was, if everything that was supposed to deploy on the lander would be deployed. One of the first things that was supposed to happen was that the lander's solar panels were to deploy. They resembled a japanese fan as they opened, but formed a full circle at the two ends of the lander. The scientists and engineers were worried that there might be some obstacle that would prevent the panels from either opening fully or even opening at all. The area for the landing had been selected, because of it's lack of large rocks, but they worried anyway. The reason that they were so worried about this particular phase of the mission, was that besides a small battery that would be used to deploy the panels and some other devices, there was no other power source for the lander and the battery would soon run down. As it turned out the panels deployed perfectly and so did the other devices that were due to pop up on landing such as the camera and arm.

It wasn't long before photos were being taken of the panel array, lander legs and then the area around the lander. Everything seemed to be in order. A Mars day is about twenty minutes longer than an Earth day and the people at NASA, that are involved with the lander, have been put on Mar's time for about the next ninety days. The lander is only expected to last about ninety, days since it landed at the pole and things will get so cold in about ninety days that NASA expects the lander to become encased in ice and rendered inoperable from then on. This was sort of a throwaway mission. The scientists knew that if they landed at the pole, the lander could only last for about ninety days, but they felt that it would be worth it to find out if there is any water there and any microbiologic life. Here is where they lost me. They had taken spectrographic readings and already knew that water ice existed there, the reason that I know this, is that they stated this during interviews. It seems to me that the second reason for landing at the pole is much more valid. NASA scientists claim that since Mars has such a thin atmosphere, there is no microbiologic life in the soil samples that they have tested so far, because the thin atmosphere is letting in cosmic rays that are sterilizing the soil. They feel that the ice at the pole might protect this life and shield it from harmful rays.

Landscape Taken By Lander

To detect these things, the lander had eleven tiny ovens installed on it. The idea is that a shovel attached to the arm will scrape up ice and soil and it will be boiled off at about one thousand degrees and the gases that will be released will be analyzed to see what was in there. One guy laughingly said to me that he hopes that there are not microscopic Martians living on the planet, that we will be scraping up. If microbes are found, can we be one hundred percent sure that we didn't bring them there from other missions or that somehow this missions became contaminated? It could be that Mars has become changed on the microscopic level, since man has started sending probes there. The U.S. and Russia have been sending probes to Mars for years. A probe doesn't have to be successful to spread microbes, it just has to hit the surface. I am not saying that this has happened for sure, just that it might be a possibility. The lander contains other experiments and one that has excited the scientific community is a sort of laser radar.

This experiment fires a special laser straight up into the Martian atmosphere. The laser light travels in pulses. When the light hits something it is reflected back to the lander and goes through a device that resembles a telescopic lens. The light is then analyzed. The laser could be reflected back from ice in the atmosphere, or even clouds, or water vapor. There are not very big clouds on Mars, but there are some. The experiment was put aboard by the Canadian Space Agency. The little ovens that I told you about about, that heat things up, are only for a single use, so when they are used up, there will be no more heating of soil and ice samples. The arm on the lander is where the shovel is contained as is a rasp for grinding up hard ice and soil, after all the lander is at the pole. There are two cameras aboard, one pops up and the other is on the arm. The lander contains a mast that is raised for communication.

Are there any experiments on the Phoenix that the general public is not aware of? I hate to say this, but I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me if there were secret experiments on board, but if there are the secret has been well kept. The lander has been kept relatively cheap, compared to some other missions that cost billions of dollars. One of the things that have helped keep things cheap is the fact that computer parts have improved so much without going up in price and many times they have gotten cheaper. As the capacity of things increase, this helps the space program. Take hard drives for example, look at how much more they can store than they did just a few years ago. The lander was part of that faster, cheaper quicker program and this time it worked. I guess we will be seeing a lot more rocket landings on Mars from now on, let's hope that they are all as successful as this one was.