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greetings from the Martian arctic

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Written by staff

Friday, 30 May 2008

On May 25, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander successfully touched down in the Martian arctic in an area called Vastitas Borealis. The craft journeyed 422-million-mile to get there and begins its three-month mission to investigate the soil and, hopefully, ice of Mars.The Mars Odyssey Orbiter discovered in 2002 that large amounts of subsurface water ice exist in the northern arctic plain.

The Phoenix lander will use a robotic arm to dig through the top soil layer to the ice below to bring both soil and ice to the lander platform for scientific analysis.Two of the main objectives of the Phoenix Mission are to study the history of water in the Martian arctic and to search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

“We see the lack of rocks that we expected, we see the polygons that we saw from space, we don’t see ice on the surface, but we think we will see it beneath the surface. It looks great to me,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for the Phoenix mission, in a recent NASA statement.

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