Phoenix Special > OMG! Just Dig!

I know that everyone talks about the image of Phoenix against Heimdal Crater but this...man...this...
Dreams coming true...
If it is confirmed that THIS is ice under the lander...it is not ice...it is GOLD!
Please...just take my prize!...

Dig! Just Dig Phoenix!

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/UA - inverted by bcory at UMSF

Mars500 > Facility

Last week, as you might have read here at spacEurope, the selection of the 32 candidates for the Mars500 Study took place, from where two of them, together with four Russian volunteers, will be sealed in an isolation chamber located in the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow, for a total of 105 days starting already in October before a full isolation period with another two European candidates, which will last for 520 days starting early in 2009.

In the upcoming week you will be able to find here an interview with ESA’s Mars 500 Programme Manager, Jennifer Ngo-Anh, who considers that we are, with this study, taking the first steps in a long journey that will culminate in the future with seeing European astronauts on Mars, until then I have decided to help you getting acquainted with the facility that the final candidates will find in their simulation of the journey that will take them not only towards Mars and back to Earth but where they will also experience the life in the landing module that would transfer them to and from the Martian surface.
Feel free to take a tour by downloading and printing the figure on the left and if there is any question regarding the project that you would like to get an answer to just e-mail me and I will make it reach the Mars500 Programme Manager.

Phoenix Special > On Mars

Phoenix's Optical Microscope started working and it looks like we have a celebration dance at Mars...

See how the little guy on the top left is really happy to see us?... ;-)


NASA / JPL / U. Arizona / animated GIF by spacEurope

I hope to count soon with a detailed explanation from our OM source, our dearDaniel Parrat, about what are we seing in these images and what we can expect to count in the future days from, both, the Optical Microscope and the FAMARS instrument.

Dance little martian! Dance! ;-)

The Maps of History > by Nicholas Previsich

Riding Mars' wave, it is time to remember and celebrate an ephemeride taking place tomorrow.

Our resident columnist Nicholas Previsich takes the opportunity to map our own path into the future having as departure the launch anniversary of Mariner 9, the first mission to orbit another planet.

.......................................................

The Maps of History

May 30th 2008, tomorrow, will mark the 37th anniversary of the launch of Mariner 9 to Mars, and it arrived there the following November only to face a blinding dust-storm that obscured nearly every feature on the planet save for some dark spots in Tharsis, which later were revealed to be volcanoes more then 20 km high.

Mariner 9 survived and went on to show us that Mars was not just the Moon's bigger brother with a trace of atmosphere, but a world of its own, with canyons, riverbeds, and more, much more then we could understand at the time. That's why we've gone back, repeatedly.

We still don't understand it all, and the harder we look the more we find that begs explanation, such as 'slope streaks' and putative geysers. Active things are happening on what was originally thought to be a dead rock in space, a dashed dream from the days of early space exploration. What we've really found is that Mars and indeed the rest of the Solar System is not what we expected, yet also dynamic in ways we hadn't thought of given our limited perspective as dwellers of Earth's surface.

Our perspective is changing, however, as we learn, as we see more. Mariner 9 was the first mission to map another world. We mapped our satellite reasonably well for Apollo and other reasons, but Mars was the first planet we really knew beyond our own...assigning map coordinates, names, and a systemic way to organize and view alien terrain.

The historical precedents should not be overlooked, nor the significance of this event. Amerigo Vespucci produced the first preliminary map of the east coast of the New World in the late 1400s; the remainder of the Americas would be mapped within a century. More then 500 years passed until another hemisphere of a world was mapped. Yet it only took thirty years afterwards to map more then a dozen worlds, from Mercury outward, as we explode beyond our cradle using tools that could not have been dreamed of by the ancients.

This is a special, even unique, time in history. The Americas were a discovery to the Europeans, but of course the Native Americans had seen them before. For the first time in 25,000 years or more, the human race is truly seeing new territory, mapping entire worlds via cameras and radar. What we see is not familiar, nor should we expect it to be. These are alien places, and although they obey the laws of physics and chemistry there is no mandate to follow a path in these processes that we find familiar or comfortable. In fact, we should be surprised to find anything familiar at all on these worlds, for the main lesson learned in our travels thus far is that few things are as they seem at first glance.

That never has deterred us. When we see a new place, we go there.

We'll do the same with the Solar System. We will move outward and survive, as we always have, make accomodations for the strangeness of new places as the drives of evolution force us to do....and somehow enjoy and learn from the experience in the bargain.

The true story of humanity has barely begun.

..................................................................................

Want to know more about Mariner 9? Click here.

Editor's note: Nicholas Previsich is now oficially retired...here are my congratulations and my wish that this will permit you to have more time to think about, write and share your ideas with me (I'm your fan you know that...) and spacEurope readers.

You're the man!

Phoenix Special > Unstowed and ready to work!

Phoenix's arm finally was, finally, unstowed! After a one day delay originated by the fact of Tuesday's commands, sent to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as planned, did not reached the lander, the reason for this to happen was the temporary shut off of the orbiter's Electra UHF radio system for relaying commands.

I've created an animated gif where it is possible to see the Robotic Arm moving for the first time after a long journey from the Earth to Mars:

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona / Animated GIF by spacEurope

Also a full panorama of Phoenix's landing site was achieved (click to enlarge)...:

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/U. Arizona/Texas A&M

Now the time is to think where to head that robotic arm and get the real action started...

According to Mark Lemmon, SSI Co-Investigator, the last images acquired are "very exciting to the science team."

And why is that? Lemmon explains:

"We see the polygons we're looking for...We appear to have landed where we have access to digging down a polygon trough the long way, digging across the trough, and digging into the center of a polygon. We've dedicated this polygon as the first national park system on Mars -- a "keep out" zone until we figure out how best to use this natural Martian resource."

Until then Phoenix will use the robotic arm to firstly dig in a different area seen in 360-degree view shown above, an area outside the preserved polygon.

Phoenix Special > Listening to Phoenix

As promised on the previous post by Michel Denis, ESA has made available the sounds of Phoenix descent, after being processed by the Mars Express Flight Control Team.

As stated in the website, and as you can confirm with your own ears, the sounds of Phoenix descending are "audible, loud and clear".

The data from the Mars Express Lander Communication system (MELACOM) that tracked Phoenix was received on Earth soon after the Phoenix landing.

Visit ESA.int for more details.

Mars500 > Candidates selection

Mars all over the headlines...

While orbiters orbit , rovers rove and landers land it is now time for news not regarding robotic ways of acquiring knowledge...

The Mars500 study, a cooperative project between ESA and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow, has selected, last week, 32 candidates (from a total of more than 5 600 applicants) from which two, along with four Russian volunteers, will be sealed in an isolation chamber for a total of 105 days starting in October. This is followed by the full isolation period with another two European candidates, which lasts for 520 days starting early in 2009.

Part of the referred chamber will simulate the spacecraft that would transport them on their journey to and from Mars and another part will simulate the landing module that would transfer them to and from the Martian surface.
So...what is the profile of this 32 special ones?
Between them, according to an ESA release, there are numerous degrees and PhDs covering the whole spectrum of science and engineering, as well as candidates who are qualified divers and pilots and/or have military experience and even candidates that previously worked on human spaceflight missions. These highly qualified individuals have come from all over Europe: Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland and...Portugal (well...must find out who he/she is...)

The criteria under which these candidates were selected were, according to Henning Soll, a DLR psychologist and a member of the interview panel for the selection procedure, not only robustness, emotional stability, motivitation for team work, openeness to other cultures and the capabilty to deal with the "slightly Spartan lifestyle" associated with an actual space mission.
A crucial requirement will deal with the combination of different personalities and talents together in order to create the optimal group for such an extensive exercise.

A medical examination, which included an ultrasound investigation of inner organs, was performed in order to determine the health status of the candidates; a psychological test, also used in the pilot selection process by DLR; and a personal interview with an expert panel to determine areas such as the motivation and suitability of each candidate in question, these were the three aspects to the selection process at the European Astronaut Centre.

More information on ESA.int and, soon, on this blog of yours...

Phoenix Special > Update

Good news and sights from Mars!

Phoenix is ready to begin moving its robotic arm, first unlatching its wrist and then flexing its elbow. The commands for moving the the arm were sent by the team on Tuesday morning, May 27, to NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for relay to Phoenix.

Somehow, MRO did not relay those commands to the lander, so arm movement and other activities are expected to take place today.

Incredible images! HIRISE has done it again...

See what I mean?...

Whoa!

In the above image (click to access full resolution) it is possible to see shows a full-resolution view of the Phoenix parachute and lander during its May 25 descent, with Heimdall crater in the background.

It shows the parachute attached to the back shell, the heat shield and the lander itself against red Mars. The parachute and lander are about 300 meters.

According to HiRISE principal investigator Alfred S. McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson Phoenix appears to be descending into the 10 kilometer crater, but is actually 20 kilometers, in front of Heimdal.

Whoa-Whoa!!!

And here you have the first views (click to access full resolution) from the Phoenix on her landing site where it will work for the next three months...Pretty bird!!!

Speaking of images...
If you are remembered, in spacEurope Live Q&A with Michel Denis and Peter Schmitz I asked our guests, what would HRSC, the camera onboard Mars Express be able to capture during Phoenix's approach?...

By then, Denis, Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, and Schmitz, Mars Express-Phoenix Service Manager, told spacEurope readers that the HRSC was hoping to catch a few (3-4) pixels of the fireball entering the Martian Atmosphere with the Super Resulution Channel while the probe was above the Limb as seen from MEX.

Now, after Phoenix already reached martian ground two questions urge:

Were those images acquired and, if that was achieved...Where are they?

I have contacted Michel Denis once more who, kindly, helped us knowing what is expected to happen.

Denis asked space exploration fans to have just a bit of patience for HRSC...

According to the Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, the images were indeed attempted but the result is very uncertain, it was also referred that the data is now all on ground, in the hands of the specialists, however, Denis added that, if anything is in the images, by no way HRSC results can approach the exceptional image made by MRO HIRISE of the parachute and Phoenix.

But of course Denis thinks that it would still be nice to see a few bright pixels dashing though the HRSC Super Resolution Channel although its spatial resolution is roughly 10 times less than HiRISE.

Michel Denis was a really happy man with the lander's success, in his words, what counts is the extraordinary landing of Phoenix "in real time" and to learn from this, such that Europe makes its first real landing with Exomars, which Denis believe will be a big success in a few years (retrospectively Beagle -2 was not much more than an experiment).

Finally, the Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, invited us all to watch tomorrow (today, May 28) the ESA website, where will be published what Mars Express has " heard" with Melacom, Denis enhances the fact of not being a a picture, but it will be their way to proudly say: "Hey guys, Europe was there too during Phoenix arrival."

And this fact has been already officially and kindly recognised by NASA already, but it was not so visible to the general public.

Today you will be able to confirm it yourself...

EDITOR'S NOTE:

This blog won't allow spurious debates or offensive remarks towards individuals or institutions therefore, the policy of maintaining the comments option disabled, except for special events like Live Q&As, will pursue. Another reason is the recurrent malicious attacks that this site has been through for several months.

One gives one hand, other wants to take the whole arm...

Phoenix Special > After landing

Avé Phoenix! HiRISE salutes you!

Besides all the drooling images arriving from the martian arctic which can be seen here, this simply amazing image was acquired during Phoenix EDL , by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) onboard MRO, and in it it is possible to see the Lander parachuting to Mars.

Why amazing? Because this is the first time EVER that a spacecraft was able to image the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.

From NASA's release:

"From a distance of about 310 kilometers (193 miles) above the surface of the Red Planet, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed its HiRISE obliquely toward Phoenix shortly after it opened its parachute while descending through the Martian atmosphere. The image reveals an apparent 10-meter-wide (30-foot-wide) parachute fully inflated. The bright pixels below the parachute show a dangling Phoenix. The image faintly detects the chords attaching the backshell and parachute. The surroundings look dark, but correspond to the fully illuminated Martian surface, which is much darker than the parachute and backshell. Phoenix released its parachute at an altitude of about 12.6 kilometers (7.8 miles) and a velocity of 1.7 times the speed of sound.The HiRISE acquired this image on May 25, 2008, at 4:36 p.m. Pacific Time (7:36 p.m. Eastern Time). It is a highly oblique view of the Martian surface, 26 degrees above the horizon, or 64 degrees from the normal straight-down imaging of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image has a scale of 0.76 meters per pixel."

Yesterday I was asking our dear Mark Lemmon if he had already the chance of taking some sleep...his answer was quite elucidative...:

"Got a little sleep. Why sleep, when there's Mars right out the window?

It was a fabulous experience. The images were better than I imaginedthey would be, given the circumstances. My obsessiveness as a kidin micromanaging my SLR camera exposure times paid off when we hadto use manual exposures for all of the early SSI images."

What a sense of opportunity for me to experience web access problems with so many things happening at a same time...I'll do my bet to solve the problems as soon as possible.

Phoenix Special > After landing reactions

Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager, to spacEurope readers (this man is already awaken?!)

"Quite a show, no??
My reaction is one of enormous pride in our team.

I have been through three of these now, and it never gets old."

Hey you! Yes you, Phoenix guys! You know we love you don't you? :-)

Good Morning Phoenix!

Isn't today a great day?

Check the latest Phoenix images!

Did you notest the similiarities between Doug Ellison's work for spacEurope's competition and reality?...

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Phoenix Special > Landing Post

Phoenix has reached Vastitas Borealis!

Play the epic!!!

Congratulations to all the Phoenix team!

EDL taking place NOW.

Phoenix successfuly separated stage cruise!

EDL in 5 minutes!

Turn to entry attitude in Earth received time taking place now.

If everything went well Phoenix has, 275,837,487 km from Earth, just reached the arctic plains of Mars!
15 minutes for confirmation.

10 minutes for touchdown in Spacecraft Event Time!

Phoenix passed Phobos orbit 7 minutes ago.

Propulsion system pressurization successful 5 minutes ago.

Entry Interface in 10 minutes.

Touchdown in 32 minutes!

Phoenix Special > Landing Day!

We're going to take this into a new post...

Phoenix about to pass Phobos orbit in 6 minutes
Propulsion system pressurization in 7 minutes
45 minutes to Mars!

1 HOUR TO MARS!
We are on our way!
We are getting to the pole!
Mars looms as minutes thick by!
Close your eyes and dream...dream of tomorrow!

Phoenix passed Deimos orbit 22 minutes ago...

And our dear Mark Lemmon got a minute to ask all of our spirits eagerly awaiting to hear from Phoenix!

"Hello,It's now mid-afternoon at the landing site. Here at the SOC we're seeing doppler show Mars' gravity strongly pull Phoenix in, so things are getting intense. Thanks for all the support.
Mark"

Landing in 1h 26 minutes!



1 Hour, 43 minutes from Mars...

Tension builds up, and...NASATV now LIVE!



2 Hours from Mars!
Right Here! Right Now!
Dance!




NASATV coverage starts at 1030PM UTC. 2 hours, 9 minutes from Mars!



Begin of EDL Phase started 25 minutes ago...check dmuller's Phoenix Mars Landing Real-Time Simulation for more details.



3 hours from Mars!

I am the ressurrection!



Our dear Daniel, working at at Tucson on the microscopy station of MECA, i.e. the Optical Microscope (OM) and the FAMARS instrument at the Phoenix Science Operations Center just e-mailed spacEurope...

"I had a small walk in the Saguaro national park with the family this morning. It made me think to something else for a while, which really was what I needed. Now we are still in our appartment, and we will drive to the SOC in a few minutes. I guess it has been a very long day in Europe ! I really hope that you will be rewarded for your patience ;)
Go Phoenix !"



4 Hours to Mars! (3h 53 minutes!)

As a way of helping me breathing better...nothing like focusing on real life...
How is it possible that the Portuguese public channel, after all written, said, done, wakes me up today saying that Phoenix will be looking for signs of past and present life on Mars?!
How is it possible that Euronews (guys! you have a partnership with ESA!...) makes me rise this morning with the exclusive information that Phoenix took 9-nine!-9 years to reach Mars?!

You guys making things happen...teach them a lesson!



I am extremely hopeful – Barry Goldstein regarding arrival of first images from Mars.



Phoenix's on course!
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander will reach Mars this evening with no further adjustments to its flight path. Mission controllers decided early Sunday not to use the last possible time for a trajectory correction maneuver, eight hours before landing."



Last suggestions for a landing arriving spacEurope mailbox...

From Eric Briggs - Atlanta Symphony - Carmina Burana - O Fortuna
From kcat070 - Tangerine Dream - Descent Into Canyonlands
From Pierre Arpin - Avril sur Mars : A french song by Robert Charlebois, a popular artist from Quebec - Only Lyrics



Nicholas Previsich, spacEurope's resident columnist, has something to say...today...:

Landing Day

On a quiet, cool Sunday morning in Los Angeles and Tucson, on a holiday weekend, some special people are waking up--if they could sleep at all--doing their morning routines and preparing to go to work and relieve the previous shift. Almost routine, despite the personal time sacrificed with their loved ones and in the pursuit of their other interests--but today is the day. This is the day they land on Mars.

Imagine the feelings running through them as the day progresses: trembling excitement, anxieties that cannot be ignored, endless mental loops of checking, rechecking, verifying, and asking the dreaded question "What if?" So many years have been spent just to get to this day; so much of themselves is wrapped into this singular event, this ultimate reward for their ultimate efforts. They are talented, but fragile as all we are, and doubtless it is a struggle to contain their emotions. Nevertheless, as professionals and explorers they do, and will shortly bend to their tasks with cold, clinical focus even as their hearts beat abnormally fast.

To face the great unknown evokes perhaps the most complex of human emotional sets. They are not the first to do so; they have august company: all their colleagues before them who have dared to land on Mars, the Apollo crews, Yuri Gagarin, Roald Admunsen, Lewis & Clark, Columbus, and innumerable others throughout history. Each of them woke up one fine morning and prepared to do something extraordinary, something that had never been done, something that would reveal new horizons.

Perhaps there is a concise description for this emotional storm: It is to be truly alive, and human. Ancient instincts borne of evolutionary drives have now transmuted themselves into science and engineering. These special people are reaching out to touch new lands as we've always done, equipped not with fire, flint knives and canoes but their direct descendants: rockets, microprocessors and spacecraft.

Landfall is near; the goal is visible, growing as they approach. They smile and grimace at the same time as, from the viewpoint of their precious cargo, this New World changes from a reddish marble against the blackness to a ball, then an overwhelming presence, then a surface...

The day of the Phoenix has arrived.
The day of will, persistence and resistance to the setbacks we will ever face in our everlasting quest for knowledge, in our journey taking us far beyond Home, in our journey towards a new home.

Who are we fragile humans?
Who are we ambitious humans?
We are the Universe’s pilgrims. A species with Onward has banner.

Who are we?
What pushes us outside the cradle? Taking the adventure as the grail and the knowledge as the spear to help us facing the unknown.
That is what we are, knights of the unknown.
Knights of the unknown seeking for ourselves.

From one pole to the other, from one planet to the other, from one star to the other.

Phoenix will stand as one of our biggest achievements, a step in the ladder.
Phoenix, for all she represents, will stand as our interplanetary Peary & Henson.
Today we will reach the pole.
Tomorrow we will be Martians.

Who are we?

We are witnesses of Evolution.
Of seeding the gold for future generations.
If we could just stand above time and space contemplating the beat of our exploration…
You, me, we, paying, dreaming, building for thousands of years to make of Earth our planet, what is left for our indomitable species? To go Beyond. Beyond Earth and the Solar System. Beyond ourselves.

Go Phoenix! Go!
And claim the pole for us.
We will soon join you.
The boreal vastness of another planet will become, today, our newest outpost.
The day has arrived.
The day Mankind, through its robotic emissary will reach the north pole of Mars.
With Phoenix will be the scientist and the engineer, the farmer and the artist, the elder and the child, the lost and the found, ALL of us.
So many faces and names and conditions and histories and, yet, we are One.
One, onboard a creation of Man, a creation able to dig for answers on a land millions of kms from the home where it was assembled by men and women.

Today, we, sitting in front of our computers linking us to Mars, MUST remember them but also what brought us here, until this day, May 25 2008, we MUST remember those who left Africa, those who populated the Earth, those who gave us origin, those who, ultimately, leaving the trees, taking the soil, gave us wings to fly into another world.

Our nature doesn’t permit us another path. We are set to take the distance.
Onward and Upward!
Phoenix…Show us the future today.
Tonight it is time to wake up!
Tonight, tonight!

I have been trying to get away from the tension but that is...obviously...impossible...and blogger isn't collaborating...this will be surely, spacEurope's longest post in this blog's short history.
To keep up the pace read it from top to bottom.

Damn! We are so great! And I feel so tiny and so gigantic at a a same time...

So tiny to be privileged to witness our efforts and so huge to be part of this incredible species named Mankind!
My Phoenix shirt is one...my dreams are on...my soul is on...
5 hours from Mars!
Get ready, get dreaming, set yourself towards the martian plains...

This is Landing Day!!!

Phoenix Special > One Day to Mars! II

Tomorrow...

Tomorrow we will all be waiting to know MORE.

Wanting to express what goes on our minds as Phoenix, thundering, will reach Mars.

We all be here tomorrow, wanting to tell to the world our joy, concerns, hopes and dreams.

We will all be here.

We will all be side by side with the team and with Phoenix itself.

Give us your best thought!

spacEurope's comment box is open to welcome what comes from the soul!

Personally I will now get me out from any web access and try to get a good night sleep, OK...maybe I'll watch Eurovision's competition, don't start laughing...it is just because one of the participant songs is listed in spacEurope's "Songs for a Landing" issue...if you are in Europe get rid of those cents and vote! It would be just great, inspiring, magic, to be celebrating the recognition of this song with the upcoming conquer of the Martian pole...

As I won't be back until tomorrow...the Day...I'll leave you with the track with which I am intending to wake up...I will leave you with a track that really has everything in it...and that as followed me during this last 50 days...it is time for landing on Mars!

To all the team, to all the space exploration fans...it is time to...

WAKE UP!

Phoenix Special > One Day to Mars!

So...24 hours to Mars hey?...

Butterflies all over my belly man...all over!

I want to write and my fingers don't seem to obbey me.

My mind and body seem to be already living in tomorrow's domains...

Butterflies all over my belly...all over!

But I want to be part of the party so here I am, there's a lot of things to say...

First!

Landing Songs...

In the last hours a variety of suggestions have arrived spacEurope's mailbox...

It is time to add this to the list...

Aleta Duvall, from Huntsville, Alabama, USA would like to honor Mr. Joe Satriani by nominating his composition "Surfing with the Alien" for addition to the "Songs for a Landing" list...done!

Take a deep breath and enjoy Brian Dernesch's, another spacEurope reader, warm suggestion...

Davin Flateau indicated this really inspiring video...enjoy it and...damn...the tension is really building up!

Now, from inside the team, our dear Patrick Woida, Phoenix Mars Scout Mission Surface Ops and Payload Interoperability Testbed Engineer, has suggested something that I want really to listen to but there isn't a youtube link for it...let us keep with the lyrics...

And last, but surely not the least, our Principal Investigator, Peter Smith...sit yourself comfortably and enjoy "By the time I get to Phoenix" by the one and only Mr. Isaac Hayes...

Now...secondly, another thing...have you checked Phoenix's website today?...You should!

It is truly a pleasure for spacEurope crew to be associated in this way with the mission and this has only one consequence...

Butterflies! Butterflies all over my belly!

Once more congratulations to the competition participants, in particular to Doug Ellison for his, not enough repeating it, fantastic artwork.

To wrap this post let us speak about inside stuff from...yesterday...but hey! It really worths reading it to get an idea about the people actually making this possible are facing the final hours before landing...

Our dear Daniel Parrat, who is at Tucson working on the microscopy station of MECA, i.e. the Optical Microscope (OM) and the FAMARS instrument at the Phoenix Science Operations Center is back after his latest presence here at spacEurope when we were 44 days from Mars.

What has Daniel to tell us?

Read it yourself:

"We are now less than 48 hours from D day, I can't believe it!

The operations center becomes very crowded now, with discussions and meetings everywhere. People are not strangers to each others now, we have spent - and hopefully will spend - many days together.

This Friday evening, the sequencing engineers had their last training with Julia Bell, who has coached us so many times during the last months. She has worked for the MER rovers, and now she puts her talents and her fantastic enthusiasm to work for the Phoenix mission. We all feel the pressure rising but we are incredibly hungry to start working. The control sequences that we plan to use during the characterization phase are now validated, just in time!

On Sunday, there will be a large event with the members of the missions and their families. Hundreds of persons are expected, as well as dozens of journalists. The "seven minutes of terror" preceding the landing will be a dramatic time; I could barely imagine the atmosphere with all these people breathlessly awaiting the touchdown. If everything goes well - my mind can not imagine something else - we will celebrate in style. We should however limit our enthusiasm, as we will start the surface operations a few minutes or hours later, depending on our respective shift. My shift ends at about 6.00 in the morning, so I should get some rest after the landing. Not sure if the adrenaline level will permit it!

See our Daniel working hard? He is not on Mars actually...but you know that don't you?...

Tomorrow, I will probably spend a calm day with my wife and my little daughter, and only spend a couple of hours on the last checks. I have not slept very well these days, so it's the last occasion to load the batteries. At this point the best I can do is probably cross my fingers..."

24 hours my friends...24 hours from the pole!

Onward Phoenix!

Phoenix Special > Arrival

And now for something completely different…

Our Stu keeps, fortunately for us, the good tradition of celebrating special events related with space exploration using the talent with which Nature gifted him. A sculptor of words that’s what the man is…

Sit yourself comfortably and read Stuart Atkinson’s Arrival.

“I am Here!”

You will be able to find a text version at the author’s website.

In case you didn't notest the fantastic images used in this small video were from the winners of spacEurope's competition...check the final results here

Phoenix Special > Through the Eyes of the Phoenix Competition > The Results!

Surprise!

The Through the Eyes of the Phoenix Competition, organized by spacEurope in association with the mission's Education & Public Outreach program, has reached the final results! And we are here to reveal them one day before the predicted!

The members of the jury, spacEurope’s crew members Stuart Atkinson, Nicholas Previsich, Lewis Dartnell and myself, the fantastic Carla Bitter, Mission's Education & Public Outreach Manager, and her E/PO team (without who this would not be possible…) and our dear Mark Lemmon, Phoenix Co-Investigator, SSI Lead, coming from continental Europe, England and the New World have expressed their preferences and, after a really tight race, arrived a conclusion and here we are to announce the winners.

As you might have been aware of, spacEurope had invited also kids under 12 to participate with their own entries…
Well…it seems like you guys weren’t able to get the playstation out of their hands…
Shame on you! ;-)
There wasn’t a single participation in that category so I have thought about a solution for the prizes destined to the sub12s and contacted the others elements of the jury revealing my intention which had no opposing from their side.
So, what will be those prizes destiny?
Three different institutions:
-The elementary school where I have studied;
-The elementary school from my town;
-The Ciência Viva Centre from Sintra.

The objective of this decision is to put Phoenix under the spotlight of the new generations, trying to get youngsters interested in such an important step in our path towards Mars.
And who knows if this won’t influence one of the students to look above, start formulating questions and pursue answers through her/his life? That would be a priceless retribution…

To all of you who participated let me express, in the name of the jury, how grateful we are for seing you put your imagination working, trying to figure out how will a never seen scenario look like.
Now that we are only 48 hours from Mars, 48 hours from seing the real stuff unravelling before our eyes, let us see where your art has taken us.
It was indeed a pleasure receiving your entries.
Thank you!

Now let me just shut up and reveal the jury’s result:
In the third place, coming from Portugal…
José Amaral and his Polar devil!

Coming in second…and really close to the first classified…
An untitled landscape created by…
Brian Cameron, Oxford, UK!

And now…

The winner of spacEurope-Phoenix Education & Public Outreach Through the Eyes of the Phoenix Competition is…

Sound the trumpets!

Mr. Doug Ellison from Leicester, United Kingdom with is So few rocks fantastic interpretation of Phoenix Mars Lander landing site!

Congratulations to the winners who, besides receiving the correspondent cool prizes, will also see their works published in the official website of Phoenix mission!

To all the others competitors, no, you were not forgotten, once more, thank you for participating and I count with you in future opportunities.
As promised, here are your entries, inspiring as they are, close as they were from being one of the three winners, they deserve to be shared with all the readers (click each image to enlarge):

You are all fantastic!
48 Hours from Mars!

Phoenix Special > Details...

Girls and boys...great update at ESA's website concerning Mars Express, and Phoenix, activity during May 25...

"Beginning late on 25 May, Mars Express will execute a series of pre-programmed commands specially designed to support NASA's Phoenix lander. The ESA spacecraft will conduct a high-speed slew, enabling it to track Phoenix as it enters the Martian atmosphere."

More HERE!

Now, for something completely different...I already know the results for the Through the Eyes of the Phoenix competition...
You guys will have to wait until Saturday...but our jury from the other side of the Atlantic has also give a contribution to spacEurope's Landing soundtrack...

Here are their choices!:

From the Phoenix's Education / Public Outreach:
Holst - The Planets ( Don't know why but I have chosen Mars...)
Theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey (why am I not surprised?...)
David Bowie - Space Oddity (why am I not surprised at all?...)
Elton John - Rocket Man (which I have replaced for David Fonseca's version...incredibly or not I was going to post this today...)
Lenny Kravitz - I want to Get Away (how didn't I remember that one?!...)

And...this is really a special contribution...bringing all the past experience into May 25 event...
Mark Lemmon, Co-Investigator, SSI Lead for Phoenix, told me that, seing that we here at spacEurope have this list of songs for a successful landing, he has his own list for various days. "Given the Phoenix heritage (and my personal journey with MPL and PHX) I could not bear to see Prince: 1999 left out.

And here's my suggestion for today...

Enjoy it! :-)

74 Hours to Mars!

This has nothing to do...

But they're out of this world...aren't they?...

Time for celebration music...

Phoenix Special > Where to be?

100 Hours to Mars! (plus 34 minutes as I write this...)


As the great day approaches and Phoenix roars on her way towards the Martian arctic one question can be made...

Where to get, on Landing Day, May 25, the juicy stuff?

Besides bitting my nails and eating this world and the other (yes...that's a nasty habit I have when nervous...) I'll be roaming, if this can serve as a reference for you, the reader, through several websites which I believe will bring us the most accurate information.

Let's start spacEurope's tour (click the images to access the websites):

And, obviously...spacEurope...what will we be doing here?

Trying to get the most quick and accurate updates as possible, giving you good music and...who knows...video and audio surprises...

Stay alert...good things will happen!

People from around the world are working to make of May 25 a day to remember!

None of us will be sleeping...will you?

Phoenix Special > A Landing Survival Kit

Either you are a first timer or a veteran on Mars landings you HAVE to read this...:

"If I feel nervous now, how am I going to feel on Sunday night, when we're so close to Mars after all the waiting? What kind of a state are my guts going to be in as thoughts of how many ways the landing can go wrong run through my head? I'm going to be an absolute nervous wreck!!
But I'll be okay, because I've got this...:"

Isn't that amazing?... :-D

Read Stuart Atkinson's full article here and learn how to be prepared...the man knows what he is talking about...

Phoenix Special > Landing Site > TUNNGA-SUGITSILT

If I had made reference in a previous post to the fact of thinking that Sir Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Station would be a fitting name for Phoenix's landing site, somehow, like to see a reference to Peary, Henson and the Inuits.

An Inuit word would be, in my opinion, a good choice since we are headed to the north pole of Mars.

Here's one suggestion:

TUNNGA-SUGITSILT

It stands for "you are welcome here"...a nice way of making Phoenix feel at home isn't it?...

If you have any other idea feel free to drop it at spacEurope's mailbox.

EDITED: For those who might get superstitious for the similarity between this suggestion and...Tunguska...here's a list of Inuit words for you to play with.

I like particularly the following Inuit expression that I find quite appropriate for Phoenix...:

AIMERPOK

which stands for "visiting and expecting food"...

Now...Get your 3D glasses on!

marswiggle, a member from the Unmannedspaceflight forum has created an anaglyph from the newest landing ellipse centerline, about 9 kilometers down (ESE) from the centerpoint.

Here you have it:

As marwiggle indicates, the new center line cuts the frame in half, from upper left to lower right (not shown). The image is half of the normal HiRISE resolution and its width is approximately 550 m.

According to the UMSF member, there's, in his opinion, no significant exaggeration compared to a realistic elevation model, very little at best.

Quoting marswiggle: "No mountains visible, but the surface is far from featureless!

Don't miss also Emily Lakdawalla's excellent entry about Phoenix's landing site at The Planetary Society blog, where you can find this precious topographic jewel...:

4 Days to Mars!

4 days to Mars? I think that this is time to reduce the countdown to hours…

And those are closer to be less than an hundred...

111 Hours to Mars! (as I write this...)

Phoenix Special > Denis+Schmitz

Remember Michel Denis and Peter Schmitz, guests of a previous spacEurope Live Q&A?

You can see our good friends, who are, respectively, Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, and Mars Express-Phoenix Service Manager, in two videos posted at ESA's website, talking about the role of Mars Express in the upcoming landing of Phoenix.

Go check it! It is always great to, actually, see those you usually only have the chance to read...

Here you have it:

Michel Denis video

Peter Schmitz video

And you have just won an extra!...:

Video with Mars Express Flight Director Paolo Ferri

Time to hunt for another music...

To be honest this is a suggestion by our last guest, Tom Pike, didn't I told you he had a great musical taste?...

Phoenix Special > Coverage

Following yesterday's effort of getting all the information concerning Phoenix landing, here you have the NASA TV schedule for event:

NASA TV Schedule

The programs listed below are changes to the regular Daily Program Schedule.

All times are UTC.

May 22, Thursday

18:30 PM - Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing - Entry Descent and Landing Overview - JPL (Public and Media Channels)

May 24, Saturday

19:00 PM - Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing - Landing Preview - JPL (Public and Media Channels)

May 25, Sunday (the BIG day!)

19:00 PM - Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing - JPL (Public and Media Channels)

22:00 PM - Mars Phoenix Lander Landing Coverage - JPL (Media Channel)

22:30 PM – 00:45 AM - Mars Phoenix Lander Landing Coverage - JPL (Public Channel)

May 26, Monday

01:30 AM - Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing - First Downlink of Data - JPL (Public and Media Channels)

04:00 AM - Mars Phoenix Lander Post Landing Briefing - JPL (Public and Media Channels)

18:00 PM - Mars Phoenix Lander Update Briefing - JPL (Public and Media Channels)

Also it is now available at JPL's website an extra goodie...after Phoenix's Twitter it is now possible to read a Phoenix Landing Blog...go and take a look!

And to start the day in a good mood I've added another track to spacEurope's Songs for a Landing fine selection...Can you dig it?

5...yes...only 5 days to Mars!

Phoenix Special > An interview with W. Thomas Pike > Imperial College, London

Stuart Atkinson has done it again and this he got in contact with Tom Pike, who (besides having an excellent musical taste...) leads a team from Imperial College which created the micromachined silicon substrates for Phoenix's microscope station. The substrate will hold soil samples for analysis by an optical microscope and atomic force microscope (AFM).

Here's the result of that interview:
......................................................................................................

Thanks for agreeing to answer some questions for us, I know you must be ridiculously busy as Landing Day approaches! On the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s website it says that you head up up the Phoenix team from Imperial College London, which has “provided micro-machined silicon substrates which provide a surface on which to hold the dust and soil samples for analysis in the microscope station attached to the Phoenix Lander.” Can you tell us some more about this instrument, the substrates you’ve provided for it, and what it will do?

Ths substrates form part of the microscopy station of Phoenix, an instrument that dates back to my time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where we first came up with the idea of sending a high-resolution microscope to Mars. As with much of the other hardware, the microscopy station was originaly intended for the cancelled 2001 Mars Lander, but we took it off the shelf and tweaked the hardware for Phoenix - the silicon substrates are one of those tweaks.


How does it feel to be a Brit involved in this high-profile US-led mission? Can you explain just how international a mission Phoenix actually is?

Planetary exploration has a very international feel to it – even when I was at JPL my colleagues came from all over the world. Phoenix itself has about a third of its scientists coming from outside the US.

There’s two of us from the UK, David Catling and myself, involved as Co-Investigators on this mission. We both became involved while working out in the States, but part of the reason we both returned was the increasing opportunities for space exploration emerging in Europe – I’m rushing back from Phoenix to take part in the first reviews of my hardware, this time its micromachined seismometers, for ExoMars.


Although HiRISE images of the landing ellipse in which Phoenix is planned to land show it is almost clear of boulders, are there still concerns that the ground might be uneven or even unstable beneath Phoenix after landing? Are there any concerns that the down-blast from the engines might damage or contaminate the landing site and make it less useful scientifically?

The ground might shift a little below us. In one of our operations simulations using a copy of Phoenix in Tucson we had to cope with this when it looked like the robot arm had dug in the wrong place for one of our samples – the sneaky simulation team had physically shifted the lander after the initial landing photos had been taken. It took a little while to figure out that our commanding was correct but our coordinate system had been twisted.

There’s been quite a bit of study as to how the landing itself will affect the site. Of course the very act of digging will get us into undisturbed soil, but one of the first microscope images we’re taking will be of any material thrown up onto a set of our exposed substrates during the landing.


We’ve all been poring over the HiRISE images, and there seems to be a consensus now that the landing site will look flat and fairly undramatic, some have even said “dull”. Surely it won’t be totally bland - what features MIGHT we see? Low hills? Mounds? Cracked ground? Frost patches?

The flipside of the thinking behind Phoenix, giving up mobility for capability, is the frustration if we see an interesting feature just out of reach. But for us the action is going to be unpeeling the surface layers of Mars. I’d be far more disappointed if we just dig up shovelfuls of uniform soil and fail to reach the ice, one of the prime scientific goals of this mission.

There is a good possibility, though, that we might land close enough to the edge of an ice-cracked polygons to be able to explore some of the very local surface variations.

Maybe you could set the scene for us, tell us what it’s like for someone involved in a mission to have to sit there, helpless, during the final few minutes of flight: where will you be during the landing itself? Will you be watching quietly at a desk, on your own? Watching monitors with other team members? Hiding in a toilet, unable to watch?

I’ll be at the Science Operations Center in Tucson, with both my colleagues and family (with a mission that has been so long in the making, there is some blurring between the two!). The University of Arizona converted a huge warehouse complex, previously a archaeological depositary, into a maze of operations rooms, labs and offices for the mission. The biggest hangar houses the mock-up of the Phoenix and for the landing they’ll be several hundred of us gathered there in front of a big screen.


An obvious and impatient-sounding question, I’m sorry, but one everyone is wanting to ask: how soon after the landing do you think all of us watching online will see the first picture from Phoenix? And what will it be of?

Engineering images will come first – not of great scientific interest but for those of us in that hangar we’ll be feeling like new parents when we see the first pictures. We’ll want to share these immediately!


Any idea how soon can we expect to be drooling over the first real colour panorama of the landing site?

We’re coming down in the Martian afternoon, and the engineers will be wanting to work out how Phoenix and the immediate neighbourhood looks first. I think we’ll have to wait until the next day until the full panorama comes down.


What are your own personal hopes – and fears – for the Phoenix mission? The “pluckly little Mars rovers” Spirit and Opportunity have – rightly – enjoyed incredible media coverage, and have really been taken to many people’s hearts. Do you think Phoenix will enjoy less media attention because it is a static lander?

The Rovers rather pushed in to the queue once the 2001 Lander was postponed, and then cancelled – and I think NASA were quite right to allow them to do so. With hindsight there was just not quite enough information to justify another static lander at the time. But there has been a huge amount of data gained from the three Mars orbiters since the rovers were launched, as well as from the rovers themselves, and this has been what has made a targeted lander mission like Phoenix once again the best choice.

My hope is that we’re able to reach ice, and that the microscopes will get an interesting mix of samples to look at. Beyond that I’m willing to work with whatever Mars chooses to reveal to us.


The MER teams are still working with their rovers several years after they were supposed to have “died”. We all know that isn’t a possibility for the Phoenix team, as lander will perish several months after landing as the conditions at its landing site deteriorate. How does that knowledge affect the scientists and engineers on the team? Does it make you all frustrated that you’ll be “against the clock” from the second you land? Or does it help you focus, and be determined to be as productive and efficient as possible?

Two of the instruments, the mass spectrometer and the wet chemistry laboratory, can only process four samples, so there is a clear end-point to the analysis however long the mission lasts. The microscope, though, can keep on looking. We have ten sets of substrates, but if we use them up we’ll just dump more material on top of the used substrates – not ideal but no worse than running out of fresh glass slides.

So for the first part of the mission we’ll be tightly choreographed so that every sample is given a thorough analysis by all the instruments of Phoenix. Towards the end, though, the microscope will take centre stage as we’ll be able to resample from any interesting locations we might have overlooked in the rush to get to the ice, as well as any new samples from fresh excavations.


NASA is taking great care to explain and make clear this is NOT a mission that is “Looking for life”, although surely Phoenix is playing a vital part in the continuing quest to find life on Mars. All the mission literature makes it plain that Phoenix will not be sending back images of wriggly martian microbes, or fossils, but is that 1000% impossible? In an interview for Nature Network London in Aug 2007 you were asked: So if you hit jackpot, and there are micro-organisms in the samples, would you be able to distinguish between living and fossilized remains? And you said: “If life really is active in the samples we’re looking at, we would look for motion upwards or sideways on the substrates (not just settling under Martian gravity) by taking multiple exposures. We can do effectively time-lapse photography with the optical microscope and AFM. But it might be rather difficult to distinguish between microfossils and dormant spores. We’d be looking to have confirmation from the mass spectrometer of TEGA that there is organic material in the samples.” Does that mean there’s actually a chance Phoenix’s microscope might send us back pictures of something… amazing?

Even if there ever was life on Mars the signature will take a great deal of work to recognise. Phoenix has some important tools to see how likely it might be that such a signature might even exist. But yes, we do have the capability of resolving down to the length scale of some microscopic organisms. Of course that’s no guarantee that we’ll see anything amongst the fine silt particles which actually set the resolution target of the microscope.


On the STFC website you said “Nobody has looked at Mars at this type of resolution before. It is very difficult to predict what we might find, but if you wanted to look for signs of the earliest forms of past or present life we will be the first to look closely enough.” Does that mean you think that even if it doesn’t image wriggling martian beasties, the microscope could actually image micro-fossils or some other type of evidence for past life on Mars?

Again, we have the possibility. Fossils are more likely than extant life – the best conditions for life there were several billion years ago. But even if the microfossils are there to be found, we may not be in the right place. On Earth the abundance of microfossils varies enormously - there is no guarantee of imaging them on a planet we know is teeming with life.


And finally, with just a few days (!!!) left to go until Landing Day, what’s the mood like in the Phoenix team? Is everyone quietly confident, now all the simulations and exercises have been completed, or is everyone a nervous wreck – like we are out here watching from the sidelines!

We’ve been so busy there really hasn’t been time to worry until now. On Friday we packed up the copy of the microscope station we have at Imperial to test out our operations scenarios – we’ll be using it in Tucson to support mission operations – so now we finally have a chance to feel anxious. I still have my day job, though – teaching undergraduates at Imperial. Perhaps the 150 exam scripts I have to mark before Friday will at least help keep the anxiety at bay.

Phoenix Special > Landing Schedule

See that image on the left? Use it and abuse it...

Reading JPL's landing schedule I was having some hard time trying to keep timing clear in my head so I have translated the times present there, which were in Pacific Daylight, into UTC which, I believe, for us from this side of Atlantic makes a lot of difference...

I have put all this together in a fancy way, printed it and put it a well visible place at spacEurope's headquarters.

I invite you to do the same.

Hope it gets useful to you too!

Another thing...don't miss dmuller's excellent Phoenix Mars Landing Real-Time Simulation available here.

You had your chance…don’t tell me I didn’t warn you…
The deadline to submit your participations to the Through the Eyes of the Phoenix competition, organized by spacEurope in association with Phoenix mission Outreach arrived at the first minute of this day.

I would like to thank to all of those who participated with their talent and creative power to imaginate a ground never seen before.
To all of those who didn’t participated…well…there’s always another chance…
All the works will now be submitted to the members of the jury which will proceed to the voting process that will end in the upcoming May 23 being the results announced in the Landing Eve.

Speaking of landing...Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager, our last Q&A guest, has kindly sent an e-mail with the objective of informing all spacEurope readers that "TCM-5 was picture perfect!"

According to Goldstein the Trajectory Correction Maneuver was well within on standard deviation of predicitions.

And we’re only 6 days from Mars!...

Editor's Note: See?...Didn't I told you that green was a beautiful colour?... :-)

Phoenix Special > 9 Days to Mars! > Where are we headed?

A one digit number…9 days to Mars, 216 hours of waiting that permit to make the last revisions, correct the spacecrafts trajectory, if necessary and to…bite some nails in advance.

That’s what happen when you have no control over the events and your mind goes on a tour starting in the pleasant Confidence Town, passing through the joyful Excitement City and ending in the troubled Vila Ansiedade…

After some fears manifested yesterday at Live Q&A with Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager by some readers (where, I must admit, I am included) concerning Phoenix’s landing site, nothing like go out and check what we are really facing here…



See that image? It is a shaded relief map of the area in and around the site where the lander is expected to reach martian ground (the center of the targeted landing area is at the center of the set of ellipses superimposed on the map), obtained from images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
And what jumps almost immediately to the eye?

Green!
What’s the meaning of this colour, beyond the fact of being indeed a beautiful colour…?
The areas where green rules indicate that these have few large rocks, which are, obviously, a potential hazard for the mission, to be more specific each hectare of the green-coded areas has between 0 and three rocks with a width of 1.5 meters or more.
On the opposite side we can see red, which is indeed a colour to avoid…
Comparing it with the green ones, in each red hectare it is possible to find more than 19 rocks with that same size, 1.5 meters or more…scary to think about it…
Bright green indicates areas with few large rocks on this shaded relief map of the area in and around the targeted landing site for NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander.

When Phoenix reaches Mars, the plans were made taking in consideration that the spacecraft must hit a specific target at the top of Mars’ atmosphere. Why is this important?
This will permit Phoenix to have a 66 percent chance (yes…33% is still a large number for my nervous system…) to land in the smallest of the three ellipses seen on the image above and a 99 percent (1% always freaks me out…) of touching the arctic inside the largest of the three.

It is also possible to see in the image two rectangles highlighted with dark outlines, these show the location of two specific images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment: image PSP_001906_2485 near the center of the target ellipses, and image PSP_001972_2485 at the western tip of the largest ellipse, this last one is not very tempting…



Fortunately it stands in a area almost outside the landing ellipse, not very tempting why? Because it show us a ground with a relative high abundance of rocks, it is also possible to see a terrain patterned and fractured into polygons. For scale, an illustration of the Phoenix lander, which is about 5.5 meters by 2 meters, was artificially superimposed on a full-resolution subset of HiRISE image (right). Similar polygonal patterns can be found on Earth in areas where repeated freezing and thawing takes place as it is the case of Antarctica.
To give you an idea of what similarities we are talking about check the image below.



In the left image it is possible to see this polygonal terrain (each polygon is a few meters across) within Phoenix’s landing site before the winter frost disappeared with the arrival of spring, the right image show us an aerial view of Antarctica’s ground…see the likeness? Like being at home…why are we worrying about?...

Now that I’ve fooled myself during the minutes I spent writing this I’ll just return to anxiety mode and buy me one of those mythical little bottles of anti-nailbiting varnish…
If before I was a monument to serenity I am now, that we are this close to the Red Planet, starting to have some problems breathing… in fact, this is my first landing on Mars, on “my” planet…but that is a story to another post…

While that post doesn't arrive take the time to read our Stuart Atkinson perspective of martian landings and also kicking the butt of of the anti-space exploration league...

9 days to Mars!
Onward Phoenix!

DON'T FORGET! If you are considering a participation in the Through the Eyes of the Phoenix Competition, the deadline is coming soon: this SUNDAY, May 18, 11:59PM UTC, is the limit!

Ah! Don't miss this!...Impressive...

Images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Phoenix Special > 10 Days to Mars! Live Q&A with Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager

This thread is now closed. On the behalf of spacEurope's crew thank you all who participated at this great Live Q&A and particularly to Barry Goldstein for the early morning hour he spent with us, making us feel closer and closer to Mars.

“While our journey to Mars is about to reach its end, I can't help but to look back at the past five years in preparation for the great, albeit nerve wracking event. The team who have worked on this mission have poured untold amounts of energy into making this revival of the Polar Lander science and the Mars 2001 lander a success. There are ten days till landing, and the team is excited about what is about to occur, yet at the same time calm due to the years of testing, analysis and training. On landing day, 26 pyro events (each redundant, so 52 in realities) all occur in the last 14 minutes before touchdown. The transitions of the spacecraft from a cruise vehicle to our landed state is a remarkable packaging and mechanical accomplishment.

Just last week we waived off our fourth planned Trajectory Correction Maneuver. The vehicle is performing so close to the navigation predictions that this adjustment was too small to execute and we decided to wait until this Saturday for our next course correction. This will all culminate in our final adjustment, just 21 hours before entering the Martian atmosphere. All indications are positive as we approach this historic event and prepare, for the first time, to analyze water on the surface of Mars."

......................................................................................................

This are the words from Barry Goldstein to spacEurope readers before we welcome Phoenix Project Manager in this same post that iwill work as the stage for May 15 Live Q&A starting at, don’t forget, 1500UTC (Doors open at 1400UTC).

When the calendar indicates 10 days to Mars and all last minute questions about the mission pop up, this is the place to be at, this is the place to ask, this is the place to get answers.

Having into account the tight schedules the mission is now facing, on the last days before landing, it is a priceless privilege to count at spacEurope with the presence of Phoenix Project Manager, those who have watched the enlightening May 13 NASA TV media briefing know with what we can count in this Live Q&A, clear, sharp, elucidative replies.

After all this time and you still don’t know how to participate?...
Here we go again:
1st step - Access spacEurope via this link;
2nd – At the bottom of this post you will find a POST A COMMENT link, click it;
3rd – A small window will open and you will find yourself at spacEurope’s Live Q&A ground, the first thing you will see is a LEAVE YOUR COMMENT box, that is where you will write down your words, questions, wishes for the team, etc. (DON’T insert any link, any comment doing so will be deleted), please try to formulate concrete questions in order to permit our guest to answer as many requests as possible;
4th – After writing down your text, scrolling down you will find a WORD VERIFICATION box, you have to fill it;
5th – Following step: select the name/URL option, fill the name box and…
6th – PUBLISH YOUR COMMENT. Done!

Don’t miss the opportunity! This is the last Q&A stop before Mars! This is the station to leave your ballast of doubts behind and provision yourself with all the required supplies for the adventure ahead!

10 Days to Mars Ahead! (and only 3 to send your participations to spacEurope/Phoenix Outreach competition…)
Onward Phoenix!

Phoenix Special > 12 Days to Mars! > With Steve Squyres, MER PI

1, 2…

Yes, that’s it. Better...it is even less...less than two weeks from Mars now…

12 Days. Speaking for myself, I have entered in that phase where every single minute definitely is a minute less towards Mars. During the time I am taking writing this lines, during the minutes you take to read this words, Phoenix is nearer and nearer to another planet, closer and closer to a whole new ground.

12 Days, 288 Hours...

And one by one they are passing faster and faster, the last preparations are taking place here on Earth, on different continents, different nations, on a common effort to climb one more step in Mankind’s staircase to Mars. ORT after ORT the phoenix mission team faces simulation after simulation in order to raise their readiness level when facing the true challenge: the reality of an harsh and unmerciful Martian arctic.

The teams of the spacecrafts composing the fleet of orbiters that will welcome the arrival of Earth’s newest ambassadress, Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express are working hard to prevent that nothing goes wrong on May 25.

12 Days, 288 Hours, 17280 Seconds...

One by one, each second falling behind, opening way to Phoenix on its unstoppable race to be the first to tell us how is like there, there, on the frozen soil of the North Pole of Mars. Although each and every second is a second towards Phoenix’s destination, here at spacEurope we have been trying to celebrate, since we have reached the 50 Days to Mars mark, every significant milestone, a dozen days to Mars sounds like as a good occasion as other...

12 Days, 288 Hours, 17280 Seconds…

Onward Phoenix!

Although each and every second is a second towards Phoenix’s destination, here at spacEurope we have been trying to celebrate, since we have reached the 50 Days to Mars mark, every significant milestone, a dozen days to Mars sounds like as good occasion as other...

Who do we have in the house today? If we had already the presence of Dr. Ashwin R. Vasavada, JPL, Deputy Project Scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory, the successor of Phoenix on martian ground it makes all sense to give voice to the mission that preceded it, that is why, in this occasion, spacEurope has contacted Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the truly astounding Mars Exploration Rover Mission, who kindly answered spacEurope’s request.

And what has Mr. Squyres to tell us?
He started by reminding us that the main objectives of the Phoenix mission are to explore past and current environmental conditions in the martian north polar region, with particular emphasis on finding subsurface ice and determining what clues it might hold regarding the habitability of Mars, asked by spacEurope if both teams are developing any specific cooperation, MER PI told us that no, the two missions operate independently of each other, but he added that there is one thing shared by both missions and that is is communication relay assets, Steve Squyres also made reference to the fact of, during the Phoenix prime mission, Phoenix will have first priority for these communciation assets.

As excitement grows among the scientific community and the general public regarding what will Phoenix retrieve, I asked Mr. Squyres if he has any special expectation regarding the pure visual scenic ingredient of landing in a totally new Martian scenario, well...his answer couldn’t be clearer...the Principal Investigator for the MER mission assumes that he has no idea what the landing site is going to look like... according to Squyres it will be, likely, very different from anything we've seen before.

Although, as mentioned by our guest, he has no special plans predicted for Phoenix landing day on May 25, I’ve asked Steve Squyres if there was a special thought he would like to adress to the Phoenix team while their spacecraft is on this final stretch to the red planet.
Here you have it...:

Good luck and stay away from big rocks on landing day!

Phoenix Special > TCM 4 Cancelled

And there goes Phoenix!
The spacecraft has breaked the two weeks barrier separating her from Mars and right on course...
After April 10 TCM (Trajectory Corection Maneuver) which permited NASA’s Mars Lander to target its certified landing site, there was a programmed TCM for, last Saturday, May 10, well...that wasn’t necessary...Phoenix’s performance has been stable enough to allow the mission’s operators to skip this particular maneuver.

Now, and has you can check on the image below there are only two possible TCM separate Phoenix from the Martian arctic, the next opportunity takes place 5 days from now on May 17 and the following on May 24, yes...24 hours prior to arrival...Landing’s Eve...


Click to enlarge

Still according to a JPL release the first possible confirmation time for the spacecraft's landing on May 25 will be at 4:53PM Pacific Daylight Time (11:53PM UTC). The event would have happened 15 minutes and 20 seconds earlier on Mars, and then radio signals traveling at the speed of light will take 15 minutes and 20 seconds to cross the distance from Mars to Earth on that day.

EDITED: Don't miss tomorrow's Phoenix briefing, to take place NASA Headquarters' James E. Webb Auditorium, at NASA TV starting at 11AM Eastern U.S. time (15PM UTC).

Who's participating? Ed Weiler, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington, Doug McCuistion, director, Mars Exploration Program, NASA Headquarters, Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ray Arvidson, Phoenix landing site working group chairman, Washington University in St. Louis and Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

My fingers are starting to get crossed...
Until then don’t forget that Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager, will be here at spacEurope on May 15, 10 days before landing, for a Live Q&A.

Just one more thing, you have now only 6 days to send your works for the Through the Eyes of the Phoenix Competition!

Phoenix Special > (Nearly) 15 Days to Mars!

Guys...we are now, nearly, only two weeks from Mars!

We didn’t forget that here at spacEurope! There were some plans for a live party tomorrow with Barry Goldstein, Phoenix Project Manager but that will not be possible...hey!...we’re all prisioners of time aren’t we?...

Wait!...Where are you going?...That’s not all, there’s one more announcement...

As time constraints will not allow Goldstein to be with us celebrating the 15 Days to Mars! mark on a Live Q’n’A, the Project Manager was kind enough to find a day and hour that will permit him to meet us at spacEurope ground.

Get it on your agenda...

Want to know how last preparations are going?
Want to know how are the pulsations back at JPL while the clock ticks louder and louder?
Want to know what will happen on Landing Day?
Want to know...well...you guys want to know everything don’t you?...So May 15 is the day and spacEurope the place to be!

After yesterday’s fantastic two hours with Denis and Schmitz we will welcome in this blog of yours Phoenix Project Manager himself, Barry Goldstein.
Next Thursday, when Phoenix will be only 10 days from Mars, we will embark on another Live Q’n’A starting at 1500 UTC.

10 Days from Mars and Barry Goldstein is willing to submit to spacEurope readers’ intensive interrogatory...THAT is what I call courage! :-)

Get ready! Get Questions! We will try to provide the Answers!
We count with your presence!

15 days to Mars ahead!

Phoenix Special > Live Q'n'A with Michel Denis and Peter Schmitz

This thread is now closed.

Stuart Atkinson, Nicholas Previsich and I, personally, wish to thank Michel Denis and Peter Schmitz for all the precious information shared and to give also thanks to all of you who participated with questions.

This is, once more, Live Q’n’A Day at spacEurope and this is the post where things will take place.
Today, instead of the usual one guest show, we will count with the presence of duo willing to answer the always tricky questions of spacEurope’s readers.
Live from European Space Operations Centre at Darmstadt, Germany, Michel Denis, Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, and Mars Express-Phoenix Service Manager, Peter Schmitz, will be here reading your questions and talking about all the activities related with Phoenix that the European mission will perform and that you may read about in a

previously published post.

Although our guests will arrive and be at your disposal at 12PM UTC, the Q’n’A doors will open to the readers one hour before (11AM UTC), you will know that when you find the “now live” information in this post’s header or in the right column of this blog.
I, and Stuart Atkinson, spacEurope resident columnist, will be here welcoming you, making you feel at home and hosting your questions before the arrival of Denis and Schmitz.

If you are not a newbie to this spacEurope feature then you already know how to proceed, if not, please read the roadmap posted Tuesday, after doing so we count with your presence here, where the action will take place!

17 days to Mars!

Onward!

EDITOR'S NOTE: Don't forget that you only have now 10 DAYS to send your entries for spacEurope/Phoenix Outreach Competition! More information HERE. Bring the kids!

Phoenix Special > Sympathy for the Devils

Click to enlarge

While Phoenix is now only 18 days away from the martian arctic, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Mars Color Imager (MARCI) and Context Camera (CTX) have been monitoring the weather over the region where the lander will arrive on May 25 around the landing site. A few days ago, on 20 April 2008, the CTX camera retrieved something that would be awesome for Phoenix to spot from the ground...two huge active dust devils within the mission landing ellipse.
You can see them in the image above marked with yellow arrows.

On Mars we’re now in late Northern Spring (Spring will end and Summer will begin one month after the Phoenix landing, on 25 June 2008) so, by the time the images were acquired it is possible to see also white patches in small craters (marked in red arrows in the image above), what are these? The leftovers of seasonal frost from the previous winter, that was, a few weeks before this images were taken, still covering the landing site.

More information and images at MSSS.


Don’t forget! Tomorrow live Q’n’A with Michel Denis, Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, and Mars Express-Phoenix Service Manager, Peter Schmitz, here at spacEurope!

Phoenix Special > MEx Reminder

Don't forget, the day after tomorrow (May 8) we will have a new Live Q'n'A at spacEurope counting with the presence of Michel Denis, Head of the MARS EXPRESS Mission Operations Unit, and Mars Express-Phoenix Service Manager, Peter Schmitz, who will help spacEurope readers to understand what will be the role of ESA's mission on Phoenix landing and beyond it.

In order to get a better idea of the whole scenario, and as a help for you to start thinking about your questions to our guests, read the previous post regarding this topic.

How to participate?

Nothing complicated...I'll just paraphrase the road map (with the corrected timeline) I have used for the latest Q'n'A with Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith:

If you are a regular visitor of this blog you already know how this Live Q’n’As work.

If it is a first time you can always check, as an example, the ones that counted with the participation of Jorge Vago, ExoMars Project Scientist and, more recently, Peter Smith.

You can start participating one hour (1100UTC) before the arrival of our guests, which will arrive here around 1200UTC, I, or other spacEurope crew member, will announce that this same post is now on LIVE mode, then, you can start leaving your questions, wishes, suggestions, etc.

How to proceed?

The easiest way is to enter spacEurope via its main page, there, at the bottom of this same post click where is written 0 (or another number) COMMENTS, click it and you are at Live Q’n’A ground…leave your words in the “leave your comment” section, as time will be limited try to make concise and clear questions, allowing Michel Denis and Peter Schmitz to answer as much requests as possible during the hour (until 1300UTC) they will stay with us.

After doing so you will find a NICKNAME box, you are not obliged to do so but please, identify yourself with a name, use a nickname if you prefer and, if possible, indicate your location (city and country).

Another thing, don’t post or access ANY link in the COMMENTS section and remember to refresh the page from time to time to check for new questions or comments.

In case you have any doubt about how to participate please feel free to send me an e-mail.

Interaction is the word! spacEurope counts with you to make of this occasion a Phoenix celebration!
19 Days for landing! Onward!

Editor's note: The Live Q'n'A will take place HERE.

Phoenix Special - Phoenix and the Quest for Life - II > With Stuart Atkinson

20 Days to Mars!

To keep you away from bitting your nails here's the second part of Stuart Atkinson's Phoenix and the Quest for Life. First one can be found here.

Enjoy the reading!

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But as amazing as our beloved “plucky little rovers” are, they are not in the daily thoughts of the public. Why? Because they are basically robot geologists, and as much as we like to tell ourselves otherwise, ordinary people, non-space people, The Public, whatever you want to call them, are not excited by, or even interested in, the geology of Mars. Unlike the enlightened people who read spacEurope, they are not excited to hear that the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter has taken the highest resolution images yet of Mars’ surface. They don't bat an eyelid at the latest news report announcing the MERs have found PROOF that Mars had water on its surface. SO WHAT?! is the collective response to the latest batch of Themis data suggesting Mars was once warmer and wetter than it is now…

SpaceEurope readers lap up these news announcements like a cat lapping up cream. They’re what we live for, aren’t they? But as much as we like to kid ourselves that it isn't the case, that the Public are as excited by these things as we are, let's face it, they're not. And that's the truth of it.

Ah, but even whisper a rumour that Life has been found on a meteorite from Mars, or drop even a hint that a spaceprobe photo shows something artificial on the Red Planet, and boy, do ears prick up!

Which is why Phoenix will, once Landing Day is just days away, become possibly the most high profile Mars mission ever. People, ordinary people, will become fascinated by it. A media perfect storm is coming, and I hope NASA, and JPL, and the University of Arizona are ready for it, because Phoenix will soon be known – accurately or otherwise – as “the probe that’s looking for life on Mars”.

It doesn’t matter that any life found by Phoenix will be about as sexy and photogenic as a flake of lichen on a gravestone wall, or as advanced as a smear of mucous left in a hankie after a loud slushy sneeze. It would still be alien life, true, genuine, “Look at that!” alien life. And thanks to decades of enjoyable but hopelessly over-optimistic science fiction, The Public have "aliens" in their hearts, minds and souls, and there is a fascination with the subject of extraterrestrial life that grows stronger and deeper every year. There are many different camps, of course. While many - most? – people are happy to look up on a clear night and, considering the number of stars in and the size of the Universe, and the odds against Man being the only intelligent species in it, Believe, others believe that aliens buzz the Earth and its inhabitants every day, that the sky is full of cosmic joyriders swooping around in their hot-rod flying saucers with glorious disregard for the world's air forces and air defence systems, only stopping now and again to either abduct some poor hapless (and, conveniently, always camera-less) truck-driving pig farmer from Idaho, or use the downdraught of their anti-gravity drives to cut breathtaking Mandelbrot set patterns in corn fields.

Still others believe that even if the sky is devoid of aliens now, it certainly wasn't in the past, and that on at least one occasion a UFO crashed, was recovered, and is even now being taken apart, "back-engineered" in the hope of revealing its secrets. You'll have your own view on that one, I'm sure, but personally I can’t help thinking that if we are back-engineering alien technology, we wouldn’t have to put up with CD cases that break when you look at them, and milk cartons that explode when you try to open them in a hurry…

But why? Why is there this desperate fascination with the existence of aliens? Why do so many people want Phoenix to find life on Mars?

Simple. As a species we're lonely. And we're scared of the dark.

Why? Well, ever since we began to realise just how big the Universe is, and how small we are, we've had a growing feeling of insecurity and vulnerability. We look out on a clear night and with our naked eyes and can see thousands of stars. A humble pair of binoculars reveals entire other galaxies, vast pinwheels of billions and billions of more stars. Now the Hubble Telescope is taking images showing tens of thousands of galaxies in areas of sky no bigger than a marble held at arm's length… That's a lot of space, a lot of stars. It makes us tinier than tiny. If we allowed ourselves to believe that we were the only intelligent creatures in the immensity of the Universe it would drive us mad, so of course we feel lonely, and scared.

And so we yearn for the company of Others.

We are a social species, Mankind; we want the company of others, it's bred into us, we've evolved that way. Our ancestors didn't live alone, they didn't want to; they needed interaction and co-operation so they lived in groups, in families. That hasn't changed. The building blocks of our civilisation are population centres - towns, cities, etc. And now we know that our "world", the Universe, stretches out billions of light years in all directions we WANT there to others out there to talk to and interact with, we WANT there to be aliens. We want it SO badly we can taste it.

And we seem to have a particular obsession with finding Life on Mars. Remember the furore back in '97, when news broke - prematurely, it turned-out - of the discovery of fossils in a martian meteorite? The world went crazy! The scientists, to be fair, had only been announcing initial results which suggested a possibility of martian life, but as usual the media added two and two to get twenty, and before we knew it every paper's front page was declaring "We Are Not Alone!" and Bill Clinton really was standing on the White House Lawn - this time without Jodie Foster or James Wood at his side - beaming with pride at how Americans had made the "Greatest Discovery Of All Time".

Now, it's rather calmed down. No-one's sure either way. But the legacy of that breathless day remains. Ask people on the street, in the bar or in the store if they think there's life on Mars and it's a fair bet that they'll tell you all about the fossils contained within ALH84001 as if the case was proven there on Day 1. As far as they’re concerned, yep, sure there's life there, it was in the paper after all.

And now along comes Phoenix, to light the blue touchpaper of public fascination and expectation. We’d better get ready for a bang.

Would the discovery of life on Mars by Phoenix really change the world, though? It’s easy to come over all evangelical about the consequences of finding microbes or bacteria there. Surely if we found life there, however primitive, it would mean Mars would have to be turned into a kind of planetary nature preserve, and access to its surface would have to be restricted to astrobiologists until the martians had been studied and all their secrets learned..? After all, it would mean Mars was already inhabited. What right would we have to the planet if it already had natives, even if they were only visible through a microscope?

Others aren’t so convinced. Some say that granting Civil Rights to martian microbes would be ridiculous, that it would lead, disastrously, to Mars being declared “Off Limits” to explorers and colonists for generations, just because of the presence of the lowest of the lowest forms of life. They point out, and they might have a point, that rock-hugging biologists might well preach about how all life is sacred, but when they have a cold and sneeze into a hankie, they don’t keep it, even though it’s full of life, do they? So-called “Reds” scream that we should forget terraforming if we find even one bacterium on Mars, but if their kids get head lice, or they see a bug in their bed, they don’t lovingly collect them and feed them and nurture them, they kill them with shampoo, or a rolled up magazine..! I’ll admit, this argument makes me shuffle my feet uncomfortably. As a long-standing Red I hate the thought of native martian life being exterminated by our exploration, but if I see a wasp on my arm, or a spider scuttling across the floor, I don’t worry about its “rights”, or the beauty of its creation and evolution, I send it to join its ancestors in Bug Heaven without a second thought. Yet I want to shield martian bacteria from the attention of those nasty scientists. What kind of a hypocrite does that make me?

But, bugs aside, people genuinely want to know we’re not Alone in this huge Universe, which is why so much attention is going to be focussed on Phoenix.

It's always been that way, if we're honest with ourselves. We just have to admit it, bite that bullet, and focus. Yes, the weather systems, geology and other aspects of Mars are all fascinating in their own right, and to the scientists who study those subjects they’re magical, wonderful and wondrous. But now, today, they are not fascinating to the man or woman in the street. They want bugs.

So, here we are. Phoenix is now, what, just about three weeks away from landing? In the time it’s taken you to read this it has travelled Universe knows how many more thousand miles closer to Mars. On May 25th it will end its long journey and fall out of the martian sky to streak across it like a fiery meteor, screaming through what passes for an atmosphere above Mars for what will seem like an eternity before opening its parachute and dropping to the surface, finally braking its descent with blasts of its braking rockets before, hopefully, touching down gently and safely on the icy terrain of the near pole. Across the world, tens of thousands – possibly millions – of people will watch the events of entry, descent and landing played out on media viewers on their computer screens, studying the faces of the flight controllers for any signs that all is well, or not well. If it is anything like the landings of Spirit and Opportunity it will be absolute torture, six minutes of true terror. But if… no, when… that first signal comes in, and the flight controllers leap to their feet, punching the air, slapping each others backs and shouting “Yes!!!!” at the ceiling we’ll leap and shout with them.

Then the Wait. The Wait for that First Picture. It should come back quite soon, and then we’ll get our first look at a completely new martian landscape. There’ll be none of the hills seen at Gusev Crater or Ares Valles. None of the craters seen at meridiani. Phoenix will show us a new Mars. I can’t wait.

And then the hunt will begin. Soil will be collected, scooped up, deposited into a small lab and subjected to test after test after test. Will those tests find life? It is possible, if unlikely. But we have to at least try. Because I truly believe that this is a test. If we don’t look for life on Mars, then maybe we’re not worthy of finding more advanced life Out There. If we take the time, and spend the money, and make the sacrifices necessary to look for and find life on Mars, no matter how primitive it is, then we will have proved our worth. If we can’t, then maybe the Universe belongs to Others, Out There.

Europa, Titan and Enceladus are beyond our reach, as are the stars, but Mars is within our grasp. Just. We have to reach out for it. Because if we do not, if we do not even try to claw our way up out of the blood-thickened filth of these tortured years, then we may be doomed to spend eternity wallowing in it.

Phoenix will show us a whole new side to Mars with its pictures. But, if it finds life there – or perhaps, even by just trying to find life there – it will show us a whole new side to ourselves, too.

© Stuart Atkinson 2008

HERSCHEL MISSION > Commander's Log Entry JD 2454591.20556

Time is running fast in what concerns Herschel (and Planck...) launch.
Leo Metcalfe, Herschel Science Operations Manager, shares with the readers (yes dear Leo...there is more than one, there are, at least two...), on his 3rd log entry, straight from the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) at Madrid, the latest developments about the mission with launch now slated for December.

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HSCOM Log Third entry JD 2454591.20556

In the period since my previous entry the Herschel Spacecraft has continued to develop towards its final shape, with the integration of the telescope and the sunshield onto the cryostat structure.

During a visit to ESTEC it was possible to view the "companion" spacecraft of Herschel - Planck - named after the German physicist and founder of Quantum Theory, Max Planck. (... who was advised by a learned professor NOT to go into Physics as "in this field, almost everything is already discovered.") Planck and Herschel will be launched together on the same Ariane 5 rocket. My previous mission, XMM-Newton, was launched on the second ever successful launch of Ariane 5. According to the Arianespace website Ariane 5 has now had 24 consecutive successful launches. A further 7 launches are scheduled before the Herschel/Planck combination comes along in December 2008. Er! Yes - December. The reader (I fear there may be only one) may recall that for previous blog entries the launch date was October 31, but revision of the schedule has been necessary to adapt to an accumulation of individually minor issues encountered in the test programme.

To stay with Planck for a moment - I was lucky enough to arrive at the test area when Planck was being balanced to ensure its stable rotation in flight (like balancing a wheel on your car to avoid vibration). The careful adjustments and tilts of the spacecraft on its dolly allowed it to be viewed from all angles from the viewing platform, even displaying the focal plane signal reception horns and entrance optics. It was like coming upon a planned show - but none of this was for display. I have to say it is a technically beautiful spacecraft. In flight it will measure tiny fluctuations in the microwave background energy left over from the Big Bang, and will facilitate characterisation of the Universe's earliest moments.

Know more about Planck here.

Whatever about minor launch slips for Herschel, launch is approaching fast. In late April there took place in Switzerland what was probably the final great pre-launch gathering of the scientists and engineers who have for years been developing the systems and facilities to support the Herschel in-flight Science Operations - the Herschel Ground Segment Consortium. Over three days about 100 developers, including future users of the system, critically evaluated the status of preparations and considered what final adjustments should be made. For many, this may be the only time they will meet colleagues whose names they see daily in emails and documents. This event harks back to remarks I made in my first blog entry, about the great human scale, in terms of years and numbers of people, invested in a space mission, as these 100 people are only the tip of the Herschel iceberg.

I've remarked in earlier entries that the Herschel Science Operations Team (HOT) has been growing steadily towards launch.
I'm wondering if I'll be losing any team members before long since I know a few of them will apply in May when ESA, for the first time since 1991, opens a process to recruit 4 new astronaut candidates.

I'd be applying myself, although I'm getting old and toothless, except I failed the medical in 1991 (I have very little stereo vision due to an eye problem as a child). What a pity!

So I guess I'll be staying on the ground and flying Herschel.
Well - there are a lot worse things you could do :)

Leo Metcalfe (HSCOM)

I feel pretty...

Want your own Phoenix t-shirt?...Draw!

These t-shirts are just beautiful! And they make quite a considerable success, drawing attention and curiosity over the mission.

Now another thing...ah sweet good old Europe…

141.39€…

That is the price I have paid to get the three t-shirts kindly sent as a GIFT by the University of Arizona out of Customs and delivered at home…

From Receitas de Alfândega to Encargos de Terminal, from Direitos e Imposições to Tráfego de Entrada the sum almost reaches the estimated value of the goodies, in other words, although UA offered it, I am actually buying the prizes to the Lisbon Airport Customs and FedEX…
Maybe they’re Armani and I wasn’t aware of…

Now DON’T you dare to not participate in the competition…you have now only two weeks to do so...crossing the ocean made the value of that prize considerably rise.
Besides the fact of having the possibility of winning something that would link you to the Phoenix mission now you have the chance to wear a t-shirt that is also fruit of my sweat…
Well…don’t take that literally…

Knowing things would be this way I would have started knitting for you… ;-)

Phoenix Special > The Role of MECA, TEGA and the Robotic Arm > With Lewis Dartnell

23 days to Mars and we have a comeback!
Lewis Dartnell, author of Life in the Universe, a Beginners Guide and our resident astrobiologist has, once more, took a close look to Phoenix, after his great lesson published a few days before the launch of the mission. Seems like it was yesterday…

Well, Dartnell did it again.
As a way of helping the readers understanding the role and expectations of some of the instruments onboard, our own astrobiologist takes us on a vivid tour around the fascinating science we can foresee ahead coming from Phoenix Robotic Arm and its camera, MECA and TEGA.

Best thing to do is to read it.
Welcome back Lewis!
Your presence is MUCH appreciated.

We are now less than a month away from the arrival of Phoenix at the Martian arctic plains. Excitement surrounding this unique mission has been mounting steadily since its launch last August, when I last wrote on Phoenix, and at long last the wait is almost over. You can already read on spaceEurope the thoughts of many of the key players intimately involved in the design of the probe and its operation on the frosty martian surface over the coming months, and what I'd like to give here is an insight into what astrobiologists like myself are hoping for.

Although Phoenix is not designed to detect signs of life itself, it will carry several instruments to Mars for the first time and provide crucial insight into whether life as we know it could ever survive in this environment - whether there is a potential subsurface habitable zone. Three major factors on the potential habitability of a site are the availability of liquid water, the presence of carbon and organic molecules, and access to energy sources. Phoenix is also the first landing probe to be sent far from the martian equator, and so will be exploring a truly unique environment: the martian arctic plains.

Robotic probes are our emissaries, sent forth bristling with instruments to explore strange lands - a remote extension of our own arm-reach and senses. For Phoenix, the science payload makes up about 8% of the total mass of the lander at launch. Which instruments aboard Phoenix promise to provide some truly exciting results on the habitability of the red planet? Here is the spaceEurope guide to the eyes and ears (and microscopes, electrochemistry analyzers and mass spectrometers!) of Phoenix.



Robotic Arm
Phoenix, like its machine cousins the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity and Beagle 2, comes equipped with a robotic arm able to reach out and position certain tools. These include a powered rasp for breaking up the frozen soil and a close-up camera. Most importantly, however, Phoenix will be the first probe since the Viking landers in the 1970s to be able to dig beneath the martian surface. Phoenix's robotic arm is 2.35 m long, complete with an elbow joint in the middle, and will be able to scrape a trench up to half a meter down into the frozen soil.

It is expected that in the arctic plains where Phoenix is landing there is permafrost water very close to the surface, and the great hope is that the probe will be able to dig deep enough to find this ice layer. Once the arm reaches this ice, it will use a powered rasp to extract samples and then reach back to deliver them to the analysis instruments on top of Phoenix. This will constitute the first direct detection of water on the planet Mars - previous missions have only observed water remotely from high above in orbit, or inferred its prior presence from the geochemistry and morphology of ancient minerals.

The robotic arm will therefore be penetrating beneath the UV-sterilised surface of Mars and potentially coming into direct contact with underground water ice and the subsurface habitable zone. For this reason, it is especially important that the robotic arm is as clean and sterile of earthly microbial life or even organic molecules as is reasonably possible. To achieve this, Phoenix's robotic arm was sealed before launch in an impenetrable bag - a biobarrier - then thoroughly sterilized through heat treatment. This biobarrier will not be opened again until after Phoenix has landed on Mars.

This effort is part of the precautions of Planetary Protection - that is, trying to prevent the forward contamination of extraterrestrial locations we visit with microbes from Earth. Most parts of the Phoenix mission, such as the bulk of the lander, the parachute, the entry shell, and so on, have been sterilized to a level of no more than 300 bacterial spores per square meter. The robotic arm has been cleansed to much stricter standards, allowing no more than a single spore per square meter of surface area. This is because the arm is the only part of the mission expected to penetrate down to the potentially-habitable ice layer in the martian ground. There remains the risk, however, of some form of failure during the descent sequence and Phoenix dumping itself at high speed into the martian subsurface, allowing even the less-thoroughly sterilized components into contact with the habitable zone.


In this rendition you can see the disposition of the scrutinized instruments in the lander.
Click to enlarge.

TEGA - Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer
TEGA will study substances within soil samples collected by the scooping arm that are vaporised when heated in one of eight tiny ovens. These whiffs of gas from the martian soil will be passed over a mass spectrometer able to determine the presence of different molecules, like a chemical nose. TEGA will be used to provide information on the presence of water and carbon dioxide ices in the martian arctic soil. The most exciting application of TEGA, however, at least for astrobiologists, will be in the first detection of organic molecules on Mars. The mass spectrometer will be able to identify, and also quantify, any organics vaporized out of the soil samples. The presence of organics in the martian subsurface is a crucial factor in its potentially habitability for extraterrestrial life.

TEGA was designed and built by research teams at the University of Arizona and University of Texas, with William Boynton as the Principle Investigator. When I caught up with Prof. Boynton last month he told me that he "hopes TEGA will find both the ice beneath the surface and that it contains significant amounts of organic compounds, the sorts of molecules required by life". As has already been mentioned, Mars is bathed in lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun and this is though to have destroyed any organic molecules lying too close to the surface. "We are hopeful that the ice layer may protect the organic compounds from the oxidizing layer hypothesized to be on the martian surface based on the Viking lander results," he said. Prof. Boynton is also PI on the Gamma Ray Spectrometer (GRS) instrument that is still flying aboard the Mars Odyssey orbiter. It was this GRS, along with a related instrument, which detected the first evidence of water ice lying very close to the surface near the martian north and south poles. As Boynton explains, "we found great amounts of water ice in the ground where Phoenix will be landing, and hopefully close enough to the surface that the probe will be able to scoop it up. But even more importantly for astrobiology, this ice may experience periods of thawing."

One necessary design constraint with the TEGA is that it is strictly limitted in the number of different soil samples it can analyse. The instrument has only eight single-shot ovens - eight chances at detecting something ground-breaking within the soil samples. The mission controllers are going to need to be very careful in using these shots as wisely as possible as the robotic arm gouges deeper and deeper into the subsurface.


In this image it is possible to see the "real stuff" about the instruments location on Phoenix.
Click to enlarge.

MECA - Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer
MECA is another instrument that Phoenix will use to examine the samples of soil scooped up by the robotic arm. MECA is made-up of several related pieces of equipment, but for astrobiology the most exciting is the wet chemistry laboratory. This experiment will stir warm water into the handfuls of martian grit and analyse the kinds and concentrations of the chemicals that dissolve out of this muddy sample. Like TEGA, though, MECA is severely limited in the number of times it can be used - there is space for just four once-only teacup-sized beakers. This means that Phoenix will only be able to use MECA on a single sample from the martian surface, and then from three further depths as the robotic arm digs underground.

Around the inner surface of these analysis cups are various sensors for different chemical species. Some of these will test the pH of the soil - the concentration of hydrogen ions, and therefore how acidic or alkaline the arctic environment is. The pH is a very important determinant of how well life can survive in different potential niches.
Other sensors will measure the concentration of chloride, bromide, magnesium, calcium and potassium ions, and thus how salty the water is. On Earth, salinity is again a major factor for which forms of life can survive. Much life on Earth survives on chemical energy, running redox reactions to power themselves. MECA's wet chemistry lab will also be able to identify potential energy sources in the martian arctic, such as soluble sulphate minerals.

Assessing the acidity and salinity of the martian ground is crucial in determining its ability to host microbial life. Hardy lifeforms are known on Earth that can survive extremes of these physical parameters, but combinations can be especially challenging. Andrew Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University and works with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Prof. Knoll recently discussed with me the latest discoveries these explorers have made about the likely ancient martian environment and how it affects the chances of life. He explained that while the water at Meridiani plains was very acidic, there are terrestrial microorganisms that can tolerate comparable pH levels. "But more recently we have been able to work out the saltiness of the water, and it seems that as the waters percolated through Meridiani sediments they became steadily more saline until most, if not all, terrestrial organisms would be challenged to survive," he says.

Phoenix will be able to tell us much more about the environmental chemistry and potential habitability of a very different region in the martian arctic. Watch this space as the results come in!