NASA has selected the $325 million Phoenix lander for the 2007 Scout mission to Mars. Phoenix was on a shortlist of four projects, including a proposed Mars aircraft, an atmospheric sample return mission and an orbiter to search for volcanic and organic activity.
"Phoenix is the first innovative, competitively selected, lower-cost mission in our Mars exploration programme," says NASA. The craft will land in May 2008 in one of the high-latitude northern regions of Mars where NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has located water ice within 1m of the surface, to conduct the first sub-surface analysis of ice-bearing materials on another planet.
The surface mission will be led by the University of Arizona. Project partners are NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which will build the spacecraft; and the Canadian Space Agency. The craft will be based on the Mars Surveyor Lander 2001, which was cancelled and kept in storage after the 1999 failures of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter.
Phoenix will characterise ice, soil, rock and local atmosphere, using instruments including a 10 nanometre-resolution microscopic imager. A robotic arm equipped with a camera will be capable of digging 1m into the soil. Before landing, a camera will image the touchdown area for reference purposes.
Source: Flight International
