[meteorite-list] NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission Begins Launch Preparations

[Ron Baalke]

Dolores Beasley
Headquarters, Washington                            June 2, 2005
(Phone: 202/358-1753)

Guy Webster 
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(Phone: 818/354-6278)

Lori Stiles
University of Arizona, Tucson
(Phone: 520/626-4402)

RELEASE: 05-141

NASA'S PHOENIX MARS MISSION BEGINS LAUNCH PREPARATIONS

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed 
lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains. 
NASA's Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for 
potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible 
indicators of life, past or present. 

Today's announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with 
preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major 
milestone followed a critical review of the project's planning 
progress and preliminary design, since its selection in 2003.

Phoenix is the first project in NASA's Mars Scout Program of 
competitively selected missions. Scouts are innovative and 
relatively low-cost complements to the core missions of the 
agency's Mars exploration program. 

"The Phoenix Mission explores new territory in the northern 
plains of Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth," 
said the project's principal investigator, Peter Smith of the 
University of Arizona, Tucson. "NASA's confirmation supports 
this project and may eventually lead to discoveries relating 
to life on our neighboring planet."

Phoenix is a stationary lander. It has a robotic arm to dig 
down to the Martian ice layer and deliver samples to 
sophisticated analytical instruments on the lander's deck. It 
is specifically designed to measure volatiles, such as water 
and organic molecules, in the northern polar region of Mars. 
In 2002, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of ice-rich 
soil very near the surface in the arctic regions.

Like its namesake, Phoenix rises from ashes, carrying the 
legacies of two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The 2001 
Mars Surveyor lander, administratively mothballed in 2000, is 
being resurrected for Phoenix. Many of the scientific 
instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for that mission 
or flew on the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander in 1999.

"The Phoenix team's quick response to the Odyssey discoveries 
and the cost-saving adaptation of earlier missions' technology 
are just the kind of flexibility the Mars Scout Program seeks to 
elicit," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director, Doug 
McCuistion.

"Phoenix revives pieces of past missions in order to take 
NASA's Mars exploration into an exciting future," said NASA's 
Director, Solar System Division, Science Mission Directorate, 
Andrew Dantzler. 

The cost of the Phoenix mission is $386 million, which includes 
the launch. The partnership developing the Phoenix mission 
includes the University of Arizona; NASA's Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space 
Systems, Denver; and the Canadian Space Agency, which is 
providing weather-monitoring instruments.

"The confirmation review is an important step for all major 
NASA missions," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, project manager for 
Phoenix. "This approval essentially confirms NASA's confidence 
that the spacecraft and science instruments will be successfully 
built and launched, and that once the lander is on Mars, the 
science objectives can be successfully achieved."

Much work lies ahead. Team members will assemble and test every 
subsystem on the spacecraft and science payload to show they 
comply with design requirements. Other tasks include selecting 
a landing site, which should be aided by data provided by the 
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launching in August, and preparing 
to operate the spacecraft after launch.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, 
Pasadena, manages Phoenix for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 
For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html

For information about the Phoenix Mission to Mars on the Web, visit:

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu

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