Phoenix on 10-Month Journey to Mars

On Saturday a robotic dirt and ice digger took off aboard the Phoenix from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a 422-million mile journey to Mars. NASA hopes that the mission will end with the digger landing within Mars’ North Pole.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is being carried aboard an unmanned Delta rocket. This will be the first ever NASA mission that attempts to find water in another planet. The epic journey is scheduled to take 10 months to complete.

Peter Smith, the chief scientist for the mission and an astronomer from Arizona University, watched the spacecraft lift off and speed towards Mars, which was marked by a tiny red spot in the sky. He said it was a good omen that Mars was visible to the naked eye. With a touch of philosophy, he compared the Phoenix with a bloodhound getting the scent of its prey.

Six hours into the lift-off, the spacecraft had traveled 365,000 miles from Earth and settled into its cruising speed of 12,000 mile per hour. Everything on board seemed to be working fine. As the director of NASA’s Mars exploration program put it, the next stop for the Phoenix would be Mars.

The spacecraft is slated to land on Mars on May 25, 2008. However, given the 33% success rate of previous Mars missions, there seems to be an air of uncertainty surrounding the current one as well. If the Phoenix reaches the Martian surface, it will spend the next three months scooping up and analyzing soil and ice samples.

The analytic equipment on board the robotic digger includes ovens and mixing bowls. The probe will not have to dig very deep to get the samples required for testing. Onboard microscopes will examine the soil samples which will be baked and sometimes mixed with water that will be carried on board.

The scope of exploration during this mission is not evidence of life. Instead, the robotic digger will be looking for traces of organic compounds. If they are present at all, it is more likely to be in the ice around the poles.

The mission has been budgeted at a cost of $420 million. Skeptics say it represents a large risk for NASA when one takes into account the success rate of previous Mars probes. That only 5 out of 15 Mars missions have made a safe landing on the planet is a major talking point.

A successful landing followed by a positive result for microbe detection will pave the way for human visitors to the red planet. That was the opinion voiced by Mike Meyers, head of the Mars mission at NASA.