NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission Gets Thumbs up for 2007 Launch

NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission Gets Thumbs up for 2007 Launch

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander
onto the icy ground of the far-northern martian plains. NASA's Phoenix
lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water
ice and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present.

Today's announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with
preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major
milestone followed a critical review of the project's planning progress
and preliminary design since its selection in 2003.

Phoenix is the first project in NASA's Mars Scout Program of
competitively selected missions. Scouts are innovative and relatively
low-cost complements to the core missions of the agency's Mars
exploration program.

"The Phoenix Mission explores new territory in the northern plains of
Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth," said the project's
principal investigator, Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona,
Tucson. "NASA's confirmation supports this project and may eventually
lead to discoveries relating to life on our neighboring planet."

Phoenix is a stationary lander. It has a robotic arm to dig down to the
martian ice layer and deliver samples to sophisticated analytical
instruments on the lander's deck. It is specifically designed to
measure volatiles, such as water and organic molecules, in the northern
polar region of Mars. In 2002, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter found
evidence of ice-rich soil very near the surface in the arctic regions.

Like its namesake, Phoenix rises from ashes, carrying the legacies of
two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The 2001 Mars Surveyor lander,
administratively mothballed in 2000, is being resurrected for Phoenix.
Many of the scientific instruments for Phoenix were built or designed
for that mission or the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander in 1999.

"The Phoenix team's quick response to the Odyssey discoveries and the
cost-saving adaptation of earlier missions' technology are just the
kind of flexibility the Mars Scout Program seeks to elicit," said
NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director, Doug McCuistion.

"Phoenix revives pieces of past missions in order to take NASA's Mars
exploration into an exciting future," said NASA's Director, Solar
System Division, Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Andrew Dantzler.

The cost of the Phoenix mission is $386 million, which includes the
cost of launch. The partnership developing the Phoenix mission includes
the University of Arizona; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the Canadian Space
Agency, which is providing weather-monitoring instruments.

"The confirmation review is an important step for all major NASA
missions," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, project manager for Phoenix.
"This approval essentially confirms NASA's confidence that the
spacecraft and science instruments will be successfully built and
launched, and that once the lander is on Mars, the science objectives
can be successfully achieved."

Much work lies ahead. Team members will assemble and test every
subsystem on the spacecraft and science payload to show they comply
with design requirements. Other tasks include selecting a landing site,
which should be aided by data provided by the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter launching in August, and preparing to operate the spacecraft
after launch.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
manages Phoenix for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html . For information about the
Phoenix Mission to Mars on the Web, visit
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu