Spacecraft specialists huddle to discuss the critical lift of NASA's
Phoenix Mars Lander into a thermal vacuum chamber.
In December 2006, the spacecraft was in a cruise configuration prior to
going into environmental testing at a Lockheed Martin Space Systems
facility near Denver. At all stages of assembly and testing, the
spacecraft is handled with extreme care and refinement.
The Phoenix mission is led by Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of the
University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership with Lockheed Martin
Space Systems. International contributions for Phoenix are provided by the
Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), the
University of Copenhagen, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. JPL is
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
