Dirt digger rocketing towards Mars by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu

NASA rocketed a robotic ice and dirt digger, saturday, towards Mars's Arctic Circle on a 422 million-mile journey that will hopefully end next spring. If everything goes according to plan this mission could be the sixth succesfull landing out of 15 international attempts, and will touch martian soil on May 25, 2008. For three months the robot will collect and analyze samples in it's minuscule ovens and bowls. The Phoenix Mars lander will look for traces of organic compounds in the baked and moistened samples, which are possible indicators for conditions favorable to life, now or once upon a time. The reason why NASA is aiming for the planet's Arctic Circle is that organic compounds are more likely to be preserved in ice, if they have ever been present. The ice is expected to be covered by about 6 inches of red soil, but also it is expected to be as hard as concrete , so the robot has been equiped with a drill to help gather enough ice samples. Even if organic molecules pop up, they could be from incoming meteorites, Boynton (lead scientist for the oven experiment) noted. "It is important, I think, to keep in mind that we are just looking for organic molecules to see if the conditions are right that they could survive," he said, "and that we aren't really going to be making any inference about whether these molecules are indicative of life." Because he North Pole would be too cold for the mission to operate properly the scientist chose a lower latitude for landing, and one of the flattest, rock free areas, so the mission can deploy properly. The Phoenix lander, weighting 772 pounds will stretch 18 feet across with it's solar panel deployed and the weather mast will measure 7 feet. NASA never tried to land a craft at such a high northern latitude, and the only mission flown to the south pole of the planet went completely silent right after landing. Because the new mission has pieces of the old one built in it, NASA decided to call it phoenix, like the legendary bird that rises from it's own ashes.

by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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