The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 25, 2008

Official News page 5


REAL LIFE NEWS: WAITING FOR PHOENIX

by Hazed

NASA's Phoenix Mars lander is ready to land on the planet, and should be touching down tonight just before midnight GMT - around 7.00pm eastern. All fingers will be crossed in mission control, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, when Phoenix heads towards what has been described as "the scariest seven minutes of the mission" as it decelerates from 13,000 mph to a mere 5 mph, using a combination of friction from Mars' thin atmosphere, a strong parachute, and a set of pulsing retrorockets to achieve a gentle landing.

The spacecraft is heading for the Martian Arctic, where assuming it lands safely it will set to work to study the history of water in the area and search for evidence of a habitable zone. The biggest threats to a safe touchdown are rocks which are large enough to spoil the landing or prevent its solar panels from opening. However, the chairman of the Phoenix landing-site working group (Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis) explained, "We have blanketed nearly the entire landing area with HiRISE images. This is one of the least rocky areas on all of Mars and we are confident that rocks will not detrimentally impact the ability of Phoenix to land safely."

He sounds optimistic but six of the previous eleven attempts to put a spacecraft down on Mars have failed, with the missions either crashing or vanishing without trace. Let's hope the Martians don't tamper with Phoenix!

You can see full details of the Phoenix mission on the University of Arizona website at http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/science.php.


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