[meteorite-list] NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission Begins Launch Preparations

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jun 2 18:18:32 2005
Message-ID: <200506022217.j52MHr307087_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

Dolores Beasley
Headquarters, Washington June 2, 2005
(Phone: 202/358-1753)

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(Phone: 818/354-6278)

Lori Stiles
University of Arizona, Tucson
(Phone: 520/626-4402)

RELEASE: 05-141

NASA'S PHOENIX MARS MISSION BEGINS LAUNCH PREPARATIONS

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed
lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains.
NASA's Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for
potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible
indicators of life, past or present.

Today's announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with
preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major
milestone followed a critical review of the project's planning
progress and preliminary design, since its selection in 2003.

Phoenix is the first project in NASA's Mars Scout Program of
competitively selected missions. Scouts are innovative and
relatively low-cost complements to the core missions of the
agency's Mars exploration program.

"The Phoenix Mission explores new territory in the northern
plains of Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth,"
said the project's principal investigator, Peter Smith of the
University of Arizona, Tucson. "NASA's confirmation supports
this project and may eventually lead to discoveries relating
to life on our neighboring planet."

Phoenix is a stationary lander. It has a robotic arm to dig
down to the Martian ice layer and deliver samples to
sophisticated analytical instruments on the lander's deck. It
is specifically designed to measure volatiles, such as water
and organic molecules, in the northern polar region of Mars.
In 2002, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of ice-rich
soil very near the surface in the arctic regions.

Like its namesake, Phoenix rises from ashes, carrying the
legacies of two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The 2001
Mars Surveyor lander, administratively mothballed in 2000, is
being resurrected for Phoenix. Many of the scientific
instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for that mission
or flew on the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander in 1999.

"The Phoenix team's quick response to the Odyssey discoveries
and the cost-saving adaptation of earlier missions' technology
are just the kind of flexibility the Mars Scout Program seeks to
elicit," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director, Doug
McCuistion.

"Phoenix revives pieces of past missions in order to take
NASA's Mars exploration into an exciting future," said NASA's
Director, Solar System Division, Science Mission Directorate,
Andrew Dantzler.

The cost of the Phoenix mission is $386 million, which includes
the launch. The partnership developing the Phoenix mission
includes the University of Arizona; NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space
Systems, Denver; and the Canadian Space Agency, which is
providing weather-monitoring instruments.

"The confirmation review is an important step for all major
NASA missions," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, project manager for
Phoenix. "This approval essentially confirms NASA's confidence
that the spacecraft and science instruments will be successfully
built and launched, and that once the lander is on Mars, the
science objectives can be successfully achieved."

Much work lies ahead. Team members will assemble and test every
subsystem on the spacecraft and science payload to show they
comply with design requirements. Other tasks include selecting
a landing site, which should be aided by data provided by the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launching in August, and preparing
to operate the spacecraft after launch.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena, manages Phoenix for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html

For information about the Phoenix Mission to Mars on the Web, visit:

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu

-end-
Received on Thu 02 Jun 2005 06:17:52 PM PDT