NASA Phoenix mision is lenghtened by Livia Cseresova

This week, NASA proclaimed that the mission of its Phoenix Mars Lander has been lengthened for one month beyond its original mission. Mission scientists, too, celebrated the reports that a sample of ice was finally transported to one of the lander’s instruments.

William Boynton, the University of Arizona’s co-investigator for Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer announced getting the ice by saying : “I'm very happy to announce that we've gotten an ice sample.“

On Thursday morning, there was news that ice had fallen into TEGA. Scientists were surprised, since they had problems with delivering the icy dirt because it was unexpectedly sticky.

Boynton and his colleagues were very joyful and during a NASA briefing in University of Arizona at Tuscon admitted that “there were champagne corks popping in the downlink room. It’s something we've been waiting a long time for.”

Last week, when scientist attempted to transfer samples of icy dirt, the sample got caught in the scoop of Phoenix’s robotic arm and just a few little pieces of ice fell onto the oven screen. While correcting their sample delivery method, scientists decided to deliver a second sample of dry dirt to the oven.

This sample, the dry one, was scooped up and delivery to the oven was confirmed. When the sample was heated up, the signal confirmed that, according to Boynton’s words, “we got a little bit of ice mixed in with this sample.”

The water ice may be detected in the sample, because when the water begins to melt, more heat is needed to lift the temperature of the sample.

Also, Phoenix has finished its color panorama view of its landing site, which is created of images taken with its Surface Stereo Imager. In the images is shown the Martian terrain in the high arctic regions. According to Mark Lemmon, lead scientist for Phoenix Surface Stereo Imager of Texas A&M University it’s “essentially an ice-dominated terrain.”

The completion of panorama was one of the criteria Phoenix had to meet to achieve mission success.

by Livia Cseresova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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