Content with the tag: “phoenix”
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Water May Have Shaped Solar System's Tallest Mountain
Using computer modeling, researchers have determined that Mars’ Olympus Mons volcano – the tallest mountain in the solar system – may have formed on a bed of clay and sediments. The researchers believe that pockets of ancient water may still be trapped beneath the mountain, potentially creating an environment suitable for life.Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]
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Carbonate Conundrum
NASA’s Phoenix lander mission is now over, and scientists are analyzing the data collected from its various experiments. Phoenix’s discovery of carbonates in the frozen northern soil of Mars indicates the area once could have had liquid water. However, there is no way to tell if the carbonates formed locally, or if they came from somewhere else on the planet and blew in with the wind.Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]
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The Sun is Setting on Phoenix
NASA’s Phoenix Lander is continuing to analyze the soil of Mars, providing further indications that liquid water was present at the surface. This is the first step in determining if Mars was once habitable for life as we know it.
Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]
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NASA Mars Lander Sees Falling Snow, Soil Data Suggest Liquid Past
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. Spacecraft soil experiments also have provided evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water, processes that occur on Earth.
A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft’s landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground.
“Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway, of York University, Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. “We’ll be looking for...
Source: [NASA]
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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 water. From orbit, NASA’s Mars Odyssey in 2002 discovered water ice in the martian north, lying just inches beneath...
Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]
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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 month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
With enticing results so far and...
Source: [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 few 10- to 20-cubic centimeter piles, or piles each containing between two and four teaspoonfuls. Scraping created a grid about...
Source: [Link]
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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 it is. With the results we received from Phoenix yesterday, we could begin to tell what aspects of the soil...
Source: [Link]
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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.
Source: [ABC]
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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 the premise that short messages will be to the point, and will be posted frequently. Twitter users post short messages...
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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.
Source: [Link]
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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 material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”
The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench informally called “Dodo-Goldilocks” when...
Source: [Link]
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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.
Source: [Phoenix Mission]
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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.
Source: [Phoenix Mission]
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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 for inspection by the lander’s Optical Microscope, a component of MECA, marks the second success in consecutive days for...
Source: [Phoenix Mission]
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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 of clumpy soil from a trench informally called “Baby Bear” to the number 4 oven on TEGA last Friday,...
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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.Source: [Link]
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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 a clock-speed of “only” 33 MHz!
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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]
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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 the martian atmosphere at about 250 miles per hour; MRO was traveling at more than 7500 mph. The two...
Source: [Link]
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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.
Source: [CIO]
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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.
Source: [Wired]
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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,” said Peter Smith, a research scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and principal investigator for the Phoenix mission....
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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 to Mars by NASA in the 1970s. Like Viking, Phoenix will stay put once it lands. And like Viking,...
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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.
Source: [Link]
Ice at the Mars Phoenix Landing Site
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