The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2008
Mission to Mars
The UA is the first public university to lead a NASA mission to Marsby Ford Burkhart
After a lonely 10-month flight, NASA’s three-legged platform, barely bigger than a picnic table, amazed millions all around the Earth with its picture-perfect landing.
When the Phoenix Mars Lander’s parachute floated down on May 25, we Earthlings caught our breath. When its legs touched dirt safely, we whooped, in many languages. When it sent back dandy pictures, the world whispered, “Oh, my.” And later when its eight-foot arm started clawing at the ice, at the command of The University of Arizona’s science team, it stirred Earthbound curiosity about life itself. Who was doing this science out there on the edge of everything? It was us.
We flew too, in a way, for 420 million miles, at up to 16,000 miles an hour. Our hearts stopped as the Phoenix Mars Lander put its brave heat shield forward and flamed toward the rocks of a place called, yes, Green Valley.
A few hundred Earthlings stood breathless on the UA Mall that Sunday afternoon as a television voice said, “Two thousand meters.” Then, 1,000, 50, 20. Its 12 rockets flamed to soften the landing. Heads looked up at the campus palm trees and over at the Optical Sciences Building. It could be happening right here! Silence. Then applause and shouts echoing down toward Old Main. We all had landed, too. And hardly a country in the world could ignore it. A French newspaper, Liberation, may have said it best with a dispatch that started:
“Bleep, bleep … Hi, Earthlings, I’ve arrived well. Right on time, a little before 1 o’clock (in Paris) yesterday morning. And right on the spot, about 68 degrees north, at Green Valley (between us, the name is poorly chosen for this barren red nook sprinkled with frost).”
Every corner of the blue planet saw the red planet with new eyes at around 4:45 p.m., UA campus time, on May 25, a date for the history books as well as the headline writers.
The HiRISE camera, developed at the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab, recorded the Phoenix landing from an orbiter 200 miles away, drawing wide praise. That stunning photo can be viewed at hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/.
The New York Times linked to the whole history of the mission in a stunning package called “A Space Traveler, Resurrected.” The link is www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/05/19/science/052008-Mars_index.html.
The Times recalled that in 2002 UA senior research scientist Peter Smith, principal investigator of the Mars mission, suggested using the parts from the Mars Surveyor 2001 spacecraft, intended to land near Mars’ equator, for a landing in the far north. “NASA gave the mission, named Phoenix Mars, a green light in 2003,” the Times said.
In London, The Guardian told how the UA science team was opening “the most important part of its mission — collecting samples of soil and ice, and looking for the organic building blocks of life,” using a robotic scoop and motorized rasp to learn if the ice “was once liquid and whether the samples contain traces of organic compounds that could serve as the building-blocks of life.”
Ah, yes, that ice.
Martian ice is a central focus, explained Victor Baker, UA Regents’ professor of hydrology and water resources, planetary sciences, and geosciences, who has studied the evidence for subsurface ice for 30 years. If the robotic scoop finds that microbes could have lived in the ice on early Mars, that would be an astounding discovery. “You probably won’t find bugs living on Mars,” Baker said, “but you’ll see if it was ever possible.”
In late July, the big news arrived: the robotic arm picked up actual water, in the form of ice, in a soil sample. The ice was equal to about 1 percent of a raindrop. The arm reached a few feet down to the surface, scooped up a soil sample from a two-inch-deep trench called Snow White 2, and put it in the tiny oven, itself about the size of a raindrop. The oven heated it up for the first actual test of the Martian water that had been discovered by remote sensing. The vapor was identified by its molecular weight as water. “It was a surprise,” said William V. Boynton of the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab, whose team spent three years designing the oven. “We thought we had a dry sample, but we got ice.”
Tests are continuing, to determine whether the water could ever have been a habitat for life, and the team hopes to collect a sample that is richer in ice.
To see the latest Phoenix Mars Lander news, go to: phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/ or the NASA multimedia site: www.nasa.gov/. 0
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