NASA's Phoenix Mars lander spent its first full day in the Martian arctic plains checking its instruments in preparation for an ambitious digging mission to study whether the site could have once been habitable.
The three-legged lander set down on Sunday in relatively flat terrain covered by fissures outlining polygon shapes. The geometric cracks are likely caused by the repeated freezing and thawing of buried ice.
Images beamed back late on Monday showed the elbow joint of Phoenix’s trench-digging robotic arm still partly covered by a protective sheath. The sheath was supposed to fully unwrap after landing.
PHOTO: AP
Mission scientists downplayed the problem, saying they could still wiggle out the arm for digging.
“This is a minor inconvenience,” said Deborah Bass, deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “We’re going to have to do a little bit of disentangling.”
It will be another week before Phoenix takes the first scoop of soil. After the initial taste test, the lander will spend the rest of the mission clawing through layers of soil to reach ice that is believed to be buried up to 30cm below the surface.
“We’ve only looked at one tiny little slit” of the landing site, said principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
While Phoenix continued to dazzle scientists with scenes from the Martian high northern latitudes, one image that it returned of the sun came out bleeded. Instead of a point in the sky, the sun appeared like a light saber sword. Bass said engineers were working to fix the problem.
Mission co-scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis is pleased with Phoenix’s progress so far.
“Like a union worker, it went right to work,” he said.
Scientists were especially interested in how the polygon patterns in the ground formed at Phoenix’s landing site. The fractures look similar to those found on Earth’s polar regions. Arvidson said Phoenix appeared within reach of a shallow trough that could be a potential place to dig.
“I was just afraid that it’ll be so flat and homogenous and that we’d be digging in soil and we wouldn’t know the context” of how it formed, Arvidson said.
Launched last summer, Phoenix sailed through 679 million kilometers of space over a period of about 10 months.
The riskiest part of the journey came seven minutes before landing, when Phoenix, operating on autopilot, had to use the atmosphere’s friction, deploy its parachute and fire its dozen thrusters to slow to a 8kph thump.
The lander executed the maneuver almost flawlessly. The only snag came when it released the parachute seven seconds later than expected. The late timing caused the spacecraft to land slightly down range from its intended target.
Two hours after touchdown, Phoenix beamed back a flood of images revealing the first ever peek of the polar horizon. It also sent back images of its unfolded heat shield and another of its foot planted in soil next to pebble-sized rocks.
Smith said Phoenix slid a bit after landing.
The US$420 million mission is led by the University of Arizona and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
BARRIER BLAME: An aviation expert questioned the location of a solid wall past the end of the runway, saying that it was ‘very bad luck for this particular airplane’ A team of US investigators, including representatives from Boeing, on Tuesday examined the site of a plane crash that killed 179 people in South Korea, while authorities were conducting safety inspections on all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines. All but two of the 181 people aboard the Boeing 737-800 operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air died in Sunday’s crash. Video showed the aircraft, without its landing gear deployed, crash-landed on its belly and overshoot a runaway at Muan International Airport before it slammed into a barrier and burst into flames. The plane was seen having engine trouble.
RSS