Phoenix Landing on Mars...

The Phoenix Mars Lander is on the final leg of its long journey to Mars, and if all goes well it will land this afternoon at just before 5 PM Pacific time. The mission's primary objectives are to understand the history of water at the landing site, and to investigate other indicators of the conditions required to support life. A major theme in these investigations is to unambiguously detect the water ice that scientists believe lies just below the surface soils.

The mission got the moniker “Phoenix” because it was hobbled together on a limited budget, largely using parts from two previous missions abandoned because of budget constraints (more on that later). Compared to the two Mars Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) currently still operating on the red planet, Phoenix is very conventional: it will use an ablative heat shield for its initial braking as it enters the Martian atmosphere, then a parachute to slow it further until it gets near the surface, then rockets to place it (hopefully) gently on the ground. Then it will just sit tight for about an hour (to let the dust raised by the landing rockets settle), after which it will unfurl it's solar arrays and start deploying its instruments – including a stereo camera which will survey the landscape from atop a mast. The first photos should come back about an hour after the landing.

Once it is fully deployed and checked out (assuming, of course, that the landing goes well), then the impressive array of instruments on board will go right to work. Many of the instruments need soil samples to do their job; these will be obtained by the robotic arm and scoop visible in the painting at right.

Longtime readers know that I am a big supporter of these robotic missions, and an opponent of the current manned space missions. The Phoenix mission is a perfect illustration of why I hold these positions: this mission costs less than a single resupply flight to the International Space Station (and a miniscule fraction of the cost of the ISS itself), but it will deliver real science results that far exceed anything we've gotten (or will get) from the ISS. The science data we've obtained in just the past decade through robotic missions like Cassini-Huygens, the Mars Rovers, Messenger, Galileo, and so many more simply dwarfs the trickle of useful data and experience we've gotten through the ISS. And yet, the budget for ISS dwarfs that of the robotic space program, and worse, takes priority. The reason the two missions from which Phoenix got its components were abandoned is because the ISS took budget priority.

Just think what we could accomplish if we (a) completely cut out the manned space program, and (b) applied just half the savings to robotic missions. That would be roughly a 20x increase in funding for those missions!