NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander was lowered into a thermal vacuum chamber at
Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, in December 2006.
The spacecraft was folded in its aeroshell and underwent environmental
testing that simulated the extreme conditions the spacecraft will see
during its nine-and-a-half-month cruse to Mars.
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.
