Pheonix Lander To Touch Down On Mars Sunday

[JLaCroix]

A soft touchdown in Mars' northern arctic plains set for Sunday is just the first step for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. If the dust clears, solar-power arrays deploy and all equipment checks out, Phoenix will then have some digging to do.

While its rover cousins continue to investigate the surface of the red planet (as they have since early 2004), the $462 million dollar Phoenix mission aims to see what's underneath the soil. "Our voyage is down; we dig," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...r-science.html

[Kefka Jr.]

Re: Pheonix Lander To Touch Down On Mars Sunday

Oh, snap. I didn't know NASA was still actually doing things!

[gray]

Re: Pheonix Lander To Touch Down On Mars Sunday

i expect opportunity and spirit to attack it and cannibalize it for parts

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: Pheonix Lander To Touch Down On Mars Sunday

Martian mole people, here we come.

[JLaCroix]

Re: Pheonix Lander To Touch Down On Mars Sunday

They're sending a probe to Pluto as well. We'd finally get a clear picture of it and see what it looks like for the very first time, unfortunately It'll probably end up being a meaningless ice chunk floating in space or something.

[orius]

Re: Pheonix Lander To Touch Down On Mars Sunday

Assuming it actually lands and doesn't crash. Mars eats space probes for breakfast. However, NASA has a pretty good track record with Mars probes, except for that one mission that was totally fubared by metric/customary measurment confusion.