Saturday, May 24, 2008

Phoenix Attempts Landing on Mars Tomorrow

"Arctic Plains of Mars Await Robot's Sunday Landing"
Space.com (May 23, 2008)

"When NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander sets down in the Martian arctic on Sunday, it will open a new, icy frontier for scientists back on Earth.

"Phoenix, a stationary lander set to make a planned May 25 descent to the Martian surface, is going to where no probe has gone before - the northern plains of Vastitas Borealis on Mars...."

"Phoenix Mars Lander: Risky Business on the Red Planet "
Space.com (May 24, 2008)

"DENVER, Colorado — Getting the Phoenix Mars Lander down and dirty on the red planet is an engineering saga stretching out over a decade. Its mission "raises from the ashes" a spacecraft and instruments from two prior tries to reach the red planet: the Mars Polar Lander that failed to phone home in 1999 and a 2001 lander that was mothballed and shelved by NASA.

"The builders of those two earlier spacecraft here at Lockheed Martin Space Systems have taken lessons learned to send Phoenix on its way...."


"Phoenix Mars Lander"
NASA home page for the mission.

As I'm writing this post, Phoenix has about 1,460,000 miles to go. There's a news conference scheduled in a little over four hours (3:00 pm Eastern Time (USA)).

"Mars Exploration: Home"
NASA/JPL home page for Mars Exploration

...to Follow Knowledge Like a Sinking Star...

I remember hearing, almost forty years ago, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." It's good to see that the will to explore still exists. At the rate things are going, I may live to see people walking on the moon again. (More at "Global Exploration Strategy:" "Dec. 4, 2006, Briefing Transcripts (76 Kb PDF)," "Dec. 4, 2006, Briefing Charts (3.5 MB PDF)"
"History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve."
-- Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut ("Physics (and Most Everything Else) Quotes" (April 28, 2008)

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