"Is fulgorite associated with meteorites, and if so, what kind of microbial life, if any, is associated with it?"
Content with the tag: “phoenix”
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Liquid Water in the Martian North? Maybe.
Perchlorate. Never heard of it? Join the club. But NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft has found it in the soil in the icy northern plains of Mars. And now that it’s been found, scientists are scrambling to explain how it got there, and what, if anything, its presence means about the habitability of the martian north.
Phoenix didn’t go to Mars to find perchlorate. It went looking for evidence of liquid...
August 22, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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Phoenix Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended
Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last...
July 31, 2008 / Written by: NASA Press Release
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Phoenix Scrapes 'Almost Perfect' Icy Soil For Analysis
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander enlarged the “Snow White” trench and scraped up little piles of icy soil on Saturday, June 28, the 33rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Scientists say that the scrapings are ideal for the lander’s analytical instruments.
The robotic arm on Phoenix used the blade on its scoop to make 50 scrapes in the icy layer buried under subsurface soil. The robotic arm then heaped the scrapings into a...
July 1, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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Phoenix Returns Treasure Trove for Science
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander performed its first wet chemistry experiment on Martian soil flawlessly yesterday, returning a wealth of data that for Phoenix scientists was like winning the lottery.
“We are awash in chemistry data,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, instrument on Phoenix. “We’re trying to understand what is the chemistry of wet soil on Mars, what’s dissolved in it, how acidic or alkaline...
June 26, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt -
Can the Martian Arctic Support Extreme Life?
ABC.com features NASA’s Phoenix lander and the search for life on Mars in a new article on their Technology and Science website. Harkening back to Viking, and citing new discoveries of microbes in Greenland’s glaciers, the article focuses on the need to understand the microbiology of Earth’s extreme environments in order to best search for life on other planets.
June 25, 2008 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice
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NAI Twitters and Tweets
Do you Tweet? If so, then you’ll be happy to know that you can now follow an @AstrobiologyNAI Twitter stream. If you don’t have any idea what the first two sentences in this article are about, keep reading! They refer to a micro-blogging tool called “Twitter,” an increasingly popular, instant-messaging service that is quickly becoming the place where news breaks first, outpacing mainstream media. Individual blog entries in Twitter are called “Tweets,” and are limited to 140 characters, based on...
June 25, 2008 / Written by: Wendy Dolci
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Phoenix Shake and Bake
In this interview, William Boynton talks about the TEGA instrument on the Phoenix Lander, and explains what it can tell us about the possibility for life on Mars.
June 23, 2008 / Written by: Astrobiology Magazine
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Bright Chunks At Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice
Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.
“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright...
June 19, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA Phoenix Lander Bakes Sample, Arm Digs Deeper
One of the ovens on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander continued baking its first sample of Martian soil over the weekend, while the Robotic Arm dug deeper into the soil to learn more about white material first revealed on June 3.
June 17, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Inspects Delivered Soil Samples
New observations from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander provide the most magnified view ever seen of Martian soil, showing particles clumping together even at the smallest visible scale.
June 13, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Delivers Soil Sample To Microscope
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander sprinkled a spoonful of Martian soil Wednesday onto the sample wheel of the spacecraft’s robotic microscope station, images received early Thursday confirmed.
“It looks like a light dusting and that’s just what we wanted. The Robotic Arm team did a great job,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. He is the lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) instrument on Phoenix.
The delivery of scooped-up soil...
June 13, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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NASA's Phoenix Lander Has an Oven Full of Martian Soil
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has filled its first oven with Martian soil.
“We have an oven full,” Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said today. “It took 10 seconds to fill the oven. The ground moved.”
Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument, or TEGA, for Phoenix. The instrument has eight separate tiny ovens to bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such as water.
The lander’s Robotic Arm delivered a partial scoopful...
June 11, 2008 / Posted by: Marco Boldt
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Sprinkle to Taste
Phoenix was unable to chew on the clumpy martian soil, so the team operating the Lander plans to sprinkle the soil instead. The spoonful of soil will fall onto a wheel, which will then rotate the sample so the Lander’s eagle eye — the Optical Microscope — can see it.June 10, 2008 / Written by: Astrobiology Magazine -
Phoenix Links for May 29th
The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander link round-up for May 29, 2008:
Another Phoenix Descent Photo. This one is even sharper with a large crater in the background.
Signal From Mars Is Restored [New York Times]
Listen to Mars Phoenix descend! Courtesy of ESA’s Mars Express
IBM RAD6000 About the onboard computer on the Phoenix lander and numerous other NASA spacecraft. It has...
May 29, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Phoenix Lander Link Round-up
The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander link round-up for May 28, 2008:
Orbiter Relays Second-Day Information From NASA Mars Lander From JPL.
Mars Phoenix Mission: Meet the Arm An interview with Honeybee Robotic’s Project Engineer, Dustin Roberts about the Phoenix Lander’s sampling arm. [YouTube]
Phoenix Mars Mission: Entry, Descent and Landing From NASA TV on YouTube.
Mars Phoenix Lander In Second Life A short video of the Mars Lander in Second Life. [YouTube]
May 28, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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MRO Snaps Phoenix
Sure, it just looks like a picture of two little white dots and a line on a mottled gray background. But it’s actually one of the most amazing photographs ever taken.As NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft made its descent through the martian atmosphere on Sunday, May 25, another spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), orbiting high above, snapped this image of Phoenix suspended beneath its 40-foot-wide parachute. At the time, Phoenix was hurtling through...
May 27, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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NASA Phoenix: Sharing the data from Mars
CIO has an article that describes the challenges of dealing with the massive amount of data being generated by the NASA Phoenix mission and sharing it with the public in real-time.
May 23, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Inside NASA's Mars Mission
Wired published an annotated photo gallery entitled Inside NASA’s Mars Mission with images of the giant antennas that will receive signals from the NASA Phoenix Lander. There are also photographs of Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Phoenix lands on May 25, 2008.
May 23, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Rendezvous with Mars
NASA’s Phoenix lander is less than a week from touch down in the frozen northern wastes of Mars, where it will search for signs that, in the planet’s recent past, the region may have been habitable.
Phoenix is the first mission to target Mars’ northern polar region. NASA’s Mars Polar Lander (MPL), launched in 1999 toward the planet’s southern pole, crashed upon landing.
The two Vikings missions, Pathfinder, Opportunity and Spirit all landed “in the dry regions of the equatorial zone,”...
May 20, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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MISSIONS - Phoenix Takes Flight
NASA’s Phoenix lander heads for Mars’s frozen north.
Phoenix is on its way to Mars. The latest spacecraft in NASA’s program of Mars exploration launched from Cape Canaveral on August 4 of this year, and is scheduled to land in the planet’s northern polar region on May 25, 2008. Its findings will help scientists answer a critical question about the Red Planet: was it ever habitable?
Phoenix is in many ways similar to the two Viking landers sent...
September 3, 2007 / Posted by: Yael Kovo -
Phoenix Prepares for Flight
Scheduled for launch in August 2007, the Phoenix Mars Mission is designed to study the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic’s ice-rich soil. A new teaser animation about the mission is available – click here to view it.
July 19, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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