NASA craft lands for Mars soil data

Faint pings from 422 million miles away led to a collective sigh of relief.

After nearly 10 months of travel, the Phoenix lander signaled a successful touchdown near Mars’ northern pole early Sunday evening. The craft was launched by NASA in August to collect weather and soil data in a region suspected to hold underground water.

David Paige, associate professor of planetary science, was consulted for the Phoenix’s landing spot.

“It’s targeted for a site in the Martian arctic region, where there’s an exchange of water between the surface and the atmosphere,” Paige said. “The measurements will give us a much better quantitative idea about the property of the ice, the soil, the atmosphere, and let us make much more accurate models of the whole planet.”

The technical challenges of a Mars landing are immense. Hurtling into the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft must quickly slow itself from 13,000 mph to 8 mph by deploying a parachute, booster rockets, and other systems in precise succession.

Historically, nearly half of Mars landing missions have failed when one of these elements go awry.

“If you’re going to pull this off, timing is everything,” said Michael Rich, a professor of astronomy. “There’s a time when the heat shield must be released. There’s a time when the retro-rockets have to fire. All the legs have to pop out. If one of them doesn’t, then forget it ““ you’ve just flushed half a billion dollars down the toilet.”

UCLA hosted mission control for the Mars Polar Lander of 1999. As a principal investigator of the mission, Paige recalled the difficulty of maintaining communication with the spacecraft.

“We didn’t get any information back,” he said. “In the Phoenix mission, they were getting constant relays of stuff. Basically, what we got was, “˜OK, we told it to go land,’ … and never heard from it again.”

Based heavily on the Polar Lander design, the Phoenix spacecraft was slated to launch in 2001.

But after the two previous landers failed, one famously due to a botched English-metric conversion, NASA opted to shelve the mission and iron out design flaws before relaunching in 2007.

With contributions from agencies in Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and Finland, the retooled Phoenix addressed dozens of issues that plagued older models. Nonetheless, much of Paige’s contributions on Polar are carried by its successor.

“(After the Phoenix landing,) the comment I got from everybody was, “˜So, Dave, it actually can work.’ The Phoenix demonstrated that there wasn’t a fundamental design flaw ““ something else just went wrong,” he said.

A long-term interest of the Mars project is finding an environment viable for some form of life. Equipped with microscopes, wet labs and mass spectrometers to analyze soil composition, the Phoenix will provide a wealth of data about the Martian surface. But Michael Jura, professor of astronomy, is cautiously optimistic about the prospect of encountering actual living organisms.

“We are a very long way from taking a picture of a little green man and putting his picture on the front page of a newspaper ““ I don’t picture that within a hundred years,” Jura said. “But the indirect evidence is absolutely compelling, if you understand the circumstances appropriately.”

After nearly 10 months of travel, the Phoenix lander signaled a successful touchdown near Mars’ northern pole early Sunday evening. The craft was launched by NASA in August to collect weather and soil data in a region suspected to hold underground water.

David Paige, associate professor of planetary science, was consulted for the Phoenix’s landing spot.

“It’s targeted for a site in the Martian arctic region, where there’s an exchange of water between the surface and the atmosphere,” Paige said. “The measurements will give us a much better quantitative idea about the property of the ice, the soil, the atmosphere, and let us make much more accurate models of the whole planet.”

The technical challenges of a Mars landing are immense. Hurtling into the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft must quickly slow itself from 13,000 mph to 8 mph by deploying a parachute, booster rockets, and other systems in precise succession.

Historically, nearly half of Mars landing missions have failed when one of these elements go awry.

“If you’re going to pull this off, timing is everything,” said Michael Rich, a professor of astronomy. “There’s a time when the heat shield must be released. There’s a time when the retro-rockets have to fire. All the legs have to pop out. If one of them doesn’t, then forget it ““ you’ve just flushed half a billion dollars down the toilet.”

UCLA hosted mission control for the Mars Polar Lander of 1999. As a principal investigator of the mission, Paige recalled the difficulty of maintaining communication with the spacecraft.

“We didn’t get any information back,” he said. “In the Phoenix mission, they were getting constant relays of stuff. Basically, what we got was, “˜OK, we told it to go land,’ … and never heard from it again.”

Based heavily on the Polar Lander design, the Phoenix spacecraft was slated to launch in 2001.

But after the two previous landers failed, one famously due to a botched English-metric conversion, NASA opted to shelve the mission and iron out design flaws before relaunching in 2007.

With contributions from agencies in Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and Finland, the retooled Phoenix addressed dozens of issues that plagued older models. Nonetheless, much of Paige’s contributions on Polar are carried by its successor.

“(After the Phoenix landing,) the comment I got from everybody was, “˜So, Dave, it actually can work.’ The Phoenix demonstrated that there wasn’t a fundamental design flaw ““ something else just went wrong,” he said.

A long-term interest of the Mars project is finding an environment viable for some form of life. Equipped with microscopes, wet labs and mass spectrometers to analyze soil composition, the Phoenix will provide a wealth of data about the Martian surface. But Michael Jura, professor of astronomy, is cautiously optimistic about the prospect of encountering actual living organisms.

“We are a very long way from taking a picture of a little green man and putting his picture on the front page of a newspaper ““ I don’t picture that within a hundred years,” Jura said. “But the indirect evidence is absolutely compelling, if you understand the circumstances appropriately.”

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