The Phoenix Lander may wait another week to dig the icy, red soil of Mars as NASA carefully unfolds a robotic arm whose deployment was stalled by a radio glitch.
“We’re not going to rush anything,” Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager, said Wednesday in a NASA TV briefing in Tucson.
The arm may be fully extended today, he said.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had hoped the probe could begin digging this week. A communications problem with a NASA satellite over Mars forced the space agency to switch to a backup orbiter.
The Phoenix’s 8-foot arm will unfurl in stages, Goldstein said. NASA will send commands to Phoenix in the morning and receive updates from the golf-cart-size probe in the evening. The craft landed Sunday.
NASA’s Odyssey satellite will relay those messages, while teams on Earth try to figure out what went wrong with a UHF radio transmitter aboard the other Mars satellite, the Reconnaissance, Goldstein said.
The Phoenix is expected to survive only three months. When the martian winter arrives, it will encase the probe in dry ice, obscuring its solar panels. The sun will also sink below the horizon, depriving the craft of energy.
