The University of Arizona Alumnus / Summer 2008
MISSION TO MARS
by Ford BurkhartPhotos provided by NASA, JPL, and UA HiRISE camera
After a lonely ten-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 space history books as well as the headline writers.
China read that the Fenghuang, aka August Rooster, had landed on the Fire Star (Mars). In Chinese myth, Fenghuang is a bird, roughly akin to the mythical Phoenix and symbolizing harmony. But the Fenghuang does not arise anew from its ashes, as does the mythical Phoenix that accounts for the lander's name. This lander was built with parts from a canceled mission. Calling it Phoenix was the idea of Peter H. Smith, a UA space sciences professor and the project leader.
Vienna marked "der Landung … on unserem Nachbarplaneten" (our neighbor planet) with the headline "Sonde Phoenix: Aus Alt mach Neu," (Phoenix Lander: From Old Comes New.)
Smith, now elevated to scientific rock star, found his words flashing everywhere around the world that news can reach, amid congratulations to the whole team.
"Ils n'auraient pas pu mieux faire," a Geneva paper quoted Smith. (Couldn't have been better.)
In Vienna, Der Standard quoted Smith as calling it a "Meilenstein in der künftigen Erforschung des Mars." (A milestone in the exploration of Mars.)
In Argentina, the newspaper El Pais had Smith saying: "Podemos ver fracturas en el suelo que nos hacen pensar que el hielo allí está todavía modificando el terreno." (The ice seemed to be altering the terrain.)
Earthlings looked on through cultural filters, but the big picture was uniform: The UA stood tall as lead agency for the whole shebang, the first Mars mission to be run by a public university. Many newspapers and Web sites linked to phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu, so ultimately the world got the news in English.
The science blogosphere was ecstatic. A space.com posting revealed, in jest, why earlier Mars missions failed: Lasers were fired from under the rocks. "The Martians actually have a monitoring station under the rubble," wrote the blogger. They hide it so "we won't invade. We might bring McDonalds."
Twitter, a blogging service, had the lander sending back tweets to nearly 10,000 cellphones and computers at one point. The tweets, written by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena — which also created podcasts, Webcasts, and a Facebook page — included these at the time of landing: "Parachute is open!!!!! Come on rocketssssss!!!!! I've landed!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cheers! Tears!! I'm here!"
The usually calm space.com roared: "TOUCHDOWN! Phoenix Lands on Mars!" It bubbled on quoting NASA: "Phoenix has landed! Phoenix has landed! Welcome to the northern plains of Mars!"
The site gushed with details. On the broad flat plains of Vastitas Borealis, it said, Phoenix set down "with just a quarter-degree of tilt." Readers wondered when a Martian city would be built, "Not an astronaut colony, but an actual city for tourists, residents, scientists, commerce, mining, hydroponic farms…" (Soon, others replied.)
In fact, Earthling travel is not a priority. As Liberation's dispatch from the Phoenix put it, "My joints will be rusted for ages before that happens … I can tell you right away it's a long way off."
The HiRISE camera, developed at the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab, recorded the Phoenix landing from an orbiter 200 miles away, drawing wide praise. "They aren't using digital cameras from Radio Shack," noted one space.com post. That stunning photo can be viewed at http://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 http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/05/19/science/052008-Mars_index.html.
The Times recalled that in 2002 Smith 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. In France, de l'eau gelée. El hielo, in Argentina.
Martian ice is a central focus, explained UA Regents' Professor of Hydrology and Water Resources, Planetary Sciences and Geosciences Victor Baker, 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 won't find bugs living on Mars," Baker said, "but you'll see if it was ever possible."
After a UA team came upon the Mars ice, the UA proposed this mission to the northern plains, and now, five years later, there we are. The UA scientists faced a summer of remote-control monitoring of the molecules in the ice and soil of Mars. It'll be hard work amid rocks and mountains that look every bit like a chunk of Arizona.
As a Geneva headline, noting the resemblance, proclaimed: "Ce pourrait être la Terre, c'est Mars!"
Editor's note: "Mission to Mars" was written in June, when the lander first scooped up Martian ice, but many questions remained. To see the latest Phoenix Mars Lander news, go to: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/.
>>>>> More cool links: A New York Times site "A Space Traveler, Resurrected," assembled photos, graphics, links to NASA video, the NASA Phoenix blog, news, history, and other multimedia elements: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/05/19/science/052008-Mars_index.html. The NASA multimedia site: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/. A blog from the UA's operations center: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/blogs/20080522.html. The Geek.com blog on the UA role: http://www.geek.com/nasa-successfully-lands-phoenix-on-mars-20080527/.
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