{"id":"4","article_title":"Probe lands on Mars, NASA says","category_id":"1","article_date":"2012-10-23","article_summary":"The first pictures from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which successfully touched down near Mars' north pole Sunday, showed a pattern of brown polygons as far<br>","article_content":"<img title=\"Image: http:\/\/www.myvivvo.com\/thumbnail.php?file=art.mars.surface.nasa_351504358.jpg&amp;size=article_medium\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myvivvo.com\/thumbnail.php?file=art.mars.surface.nasa_351504358.jpg&amp;size=article_medium\" alt=\"Probe lands on Mars NASA says\">\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n                                \r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span>The first pictures from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which \r\nsuccessfully touched down near Mars' north pole Sunday, showed a pattern\r\n of brown polygons as far as the camera could see.<br><br>\"It's \r\nsurprisingly close to what we expected and that's what surprises me \r\nmost,\" said Peter Smith, the mission's principal investigator. \"I \r\nexpected a bigger surprise.\"<br><br>The landing on the Red Planet's \r\narctic plains -- which ended a 296-day journey -- was right on target, a\r\n feat NASA's Ed Weiler compared to landing a hole-in-one with a golf \r\nball from 10,000 miles.<br><br>The landing -- dubbed the \"seven minutes \r\nof terror\" -- was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who \r\nhave witnessed the failure of similar missions.<br><br>In mission \r\ncontrol at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, \r\nthey celebrated the lander's much-anticipated entry.<br><br>\"It was better than we could have imagined,\" Barry Goldstein, project manager for the Phoenix mission, told CNN.<br><br>The Phoenix's 90-day mission is to analyze the soils and permafrost of Mars' arctic tundra for signs of past or present life.<br><br>The\r\n lander is equipped with a robotic arm capable of scooping up ice and \r\ndirt to look for organic evidence that life once existed there, or even \r\nexists now.<br><br>\"We are not going to be able to answer the final \r\nquestion of is there life on Mars,\" said principal investigator Peter \r\nSmith, an optical scientist with the University of Arizona. \"We will \r\ntake the next important step. We'll find out if there's organic material\r\n associated with this ice in the polar regions. Ice is a preserver, and \r\nif there ever were organics on Mars and they got into that ice, they \r\nwill still be there today.\"<br><br>The twin to the Mars Polar Lander \r\nspacecraft, Phoenix was supposed to travel to Mars in 2001 as the Mars \r\nSurveyor spacecraft. They were originally part of the \"better, faster, \r\ncheaper\" program, formulated by then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to \r\nbeef up planetary exploration on a lean budget.<br><br>But Polar \r\nmalfunctioned during its descent into Mars' atmosphere in 1999 and \r\ncrashed. An investigation concluded that as many as a dozen design flaws\r\n or malfunctions doomed the spacecraft.<br><br>The failure of that \r\nmission, as well as another spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter \r\nthe same year, led to NASA to put future missions on hold and rethink \r\nthe \"better, faster, cheaper\" approach. Mars Surveyor went to the \r\nwarehouse.<br><br>But all was not lost. In 2003, Smith proposed a plan \r\nto re-engineer the Mars Surveyor and fly it on a mission to look for \r\nsignatures of life in the ice and dirt of Mars far North. Mars Phoenix, \r\nliterally and figuratively, rose from the ashes of Surveyor.<br><br>Engineers\r\n set to work, testing and retesting the onboard system to ferret out and\r\n fix all the flaws they could find. iReport.com: Send your photos, video\r\n of space.<br><br>\"We always have to be scared to death,\" Goldstein \r\nsaid. \"The minute we lose fear is the minute that we stop looking for \r\nthe next problem.\"<br><br>The team was concerned about the Phoenix \r\nlanding system. NASA had not successfully landed a probe on Mars using \r\nlanding legs and stabilizing thrusters since the Viking missions in the \r\nlate 1970s. The other three successful Mars landings -- Pathfinder in \r\n1997 and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004 -- used massive \r\nairbags that inflated around the landing craft just before landing to \r\ncushion the impact.<br><br>The Phoenix doesn't have airbags because the lander is too big and heavy for them to work properly.<br><br>Its\r\n landing site was targeted for the far northern plains of Mars, near the\r\n northern polar ice cap. Data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft indicate \r\nlarge quantities of ice there, likely in the form of permafrost, either \r\non the surface or just barely underground.<br><br>\"Follow the water\" has become the unifying theme of NASA's Mars exploration strategy.<br><br>In\r\n 2004, the rover Opportunity found evidence that a salty sea once lapped\r\n the shores of an area near Mars' equator called Meridiani Planum. \r\nAstrobiologists generally agree that it's best to look for life in wet \r\nplaces.<\/span>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div><br>","created_by":null,"created":null,"modified_by":null,"modified":null}