NASA’s Phoenix lander – built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Inc. – is set to begin its year-long journey from Jefferson County to Mars today.
The size of a kitchen table, Phoenix should settle its three feet down near Mars’ north pole next May, stretch out a 7-foot arm and dig in martian soil for signs of life.
The first leg of its journey will be by truck from Lockheed’s Waterton Canyon site to Buckley Air Force Base, where it will fly to Florida aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane.
Phoenix will be the first spacecraft to study the chemical components found in extraterrestrial water.
“We want to find traces of life,” said Matt Cox, Lockheed’s assembly, test and launch operations manager.
“First and foremost, we want to go and touch water,” said Cox.
Cox has worked on six other Mars missions, he said – with four successes and two failures.
Real success with Phoenix, Cox said, would mean finding organic compounds – the chemical signature of life beyond Earth.
“We’d love the outcome to be that we keep the mystery alive, the potential for past life … or current,” Cox said.
The 1,500-pound spacecraft, scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in early August, is very different from the last three spacecraft the National Aeronautics and Space Administration set down on Mars.
“Pathfinder and the two Mars Exploration Rovers were airbag landers,” Cox said. “There’s shock. Without it, we can carry more sophisticated science instruments.”
Phoenix should land with a parachute and thrusters, so the most crucial minutes of the mission are the last seven, Cox said. The craft needs to slow from more than 7,000 mph to a gentle landing.
The Mars Polar Lander, also built by Lockheed Martin, was to have had a similar landing on the Red Planet in 1999, but it crashed when its thruster engines shut down too early.
Phoenix was so-named because it relies on updated technology from the Polar Lander, and a canceled NASA mission called the Mars 2001 Lander.
Lockheed engineers also built the successful Mars Odyssey, an orbiter that discovered vast fields of water ice on Mars, much of it underground, said Dave Spencer, deputy project manager for Phoenix at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Phoenix will dig soil and ice and deliver tiny samples to on-board instruments for analysis, he said.
“If there are organics in the ice, we’ll find them,” Spencer said.
Organic chemicals could indicate past life on Mars but probably not current life, he said.
“It’s been cold for millions of years in this area,” Spencer said.
Phoenix’s chemical instruments won’t be able to detect DNA, the genetic basis of life on Earth, said Deborah Bass, JPL’s deputy project scientist for Phoenix.
“We would be able to see the constituents of DNA” if they were present, Bass said.
The Phoenix mission, originally planned to cost $386 million, is expected to total $414 million, Spencer said. That’s still considered “low-cost” for a NASA mission to another planet.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
