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NASA restores radio contact with Phoenix Mars lander
Washington (AFP) May 27, 2008 NASA has cleared up a malfunction that for several hours caused a rupture in communications between Phoenix Mars Lander, the US space agency said Wednesday. NASA said a "transient event" had knocked out UHF radio transmissions between Phoenix and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which relays data and instructions between the Phoenix and Earth. A statement early Wednesday from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California said the problem was solved late Tuesday, although scientists still do not know what caused the glitch. "NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully received information from Phoenix Tuesday evening and relayed the information to Earth," the statement said. "The relayed transmission included images and other data collected by Phoenix during the mission's second day after landing on Mars," according to space officials, who added that the Mars Odyssey orbiter was scheduled to relay commands to the lander early Wednesday. The malfunction delayed the commands to deploy Phoenix's robotic arm, which will collect samples of soil and hopefully ice as well as traces of organic compounds, the building blocks of life. Phoenix's robotic arm has the ability to dig as deep as half a meter (20 inches) below the surface to reach a permafrost-like layer of water ice mixed with soil. Tuesday's communication snags notwithstanding, the mission so far as gone exceedingly well, US space officials said. "Phoenix has performed extremely well, beyond our expectations. Currently it is in great shape," Gary Napier, spokesman for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which built the lander, told AFP Tuesday. "We hope to start digging into the Martian soil sometime in about a week" Napier said, after the arm is set up and programmed for the operation. The mission's main aim is to determine whether the frigid Martian polar region can support microbial life. The mission is seeking in particular the presence of water in its liquid form, and key elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and hydrogen. Photographs from Phoenix showed polygonal shapes on the surface that NASA scientists believe are evidence of the subsurface ice repeatedly thawing and refreezing. A second goal of the mission is to study the past and present climate of the polar region, never before visited by a probe from Earth. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Share This Article With Planet Earth
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NASA probe sends first pictures from Martian arctic
Washington (AFP) May 26, 2008A NASA probe sent back never-before-seen pictures of Mars' north pole Monday, in the most ambitious mission to date to find life-sustaining minerals on the Red Planet. |
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