NASA engineer Barry Goldstein said he’s “scared to death” about the Colorado-built Phoenix Mars Lander, and everybody else on the mission should be, too.
“You’ve got to be constantly scared to death and have the perspective that there are flaws in the system,” Goldstein said Thursday, while standing alongside the solar-powered Phoenix lander in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems southwest of Denver in Jefferson County.
“That doesn’t mean that there are flaws, but you have to constantly be hunting to find them if they are there,” said Goldstein, NASA’s Phoenix project manager.
February 6th, 2007
Engineer sweats new Mars lander Rocky Mountain News
February 1st, 2007
Phoenix Lander Readied For Mars Exploration
NASA’s next mission to Mars—the Phoenix lander—is undergoing readiness testing in preparation for an early August launch window.
For the first time since NASA’s Viking missions in the 1970’s, the plan calls for Phoenix to safely settle down on Mars using a set of onboard rocket thrusters—no airbags this time as successfully used by NASA’s last three red planet landings.
When Phoenix touches down within the northern polar plains of Mars, it will be ready for research duties. This stationary probe is armed with a robotic scoop to dig and scratch into the martian surface for answers regarding the history of water on Mars and the planet’s potential as an extraterrestrial address for life.
December 6th, 2006
Detailed Look at the Next Mars Lander
NASA’s next mission to the red planet—the Phoenix Mars Lander—is a true wedding of technology with planetary exploration: Something old, something new…something borrowed and something blue.
Named after the resilient mythological bird, Phoenix is based upon a lander that was meant to fly in 2001, but administratively mothballed by NASA. It is also outfitted with instruments that are improved variations of gear carried onboard the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander. That vehicle went astray on touchdown nearly seven years ago, a breakdown of managerial and engineering matters—sadly setting off blues for a red planet.
Today, the flight of the Phoenix is a different story.
May 2nd, 2006
Phoenix Mars Lander is Coming Together Universe Today
NASA’s next mission to the Red Planet, the Phoenix Mars Lander, is coming together in preparation for its August 2007 launch. Engineers are now incorporating many of its subsystems, including the flight computer, power systems and science instruments. If all goes well, the spacecraft will land near Mars’ north polar ice cap, and analyze samples that it scoops up from the icy soil.
April 5th, 2006
Phoenix Mars Lander: Getting Down and Dirty On the Red Planet
The next Mars lander is undergoing assembly and testing, being readied for departure next year to explore the martian arctic. This probe is equipped to dig deep, quite literally, into an ongoing mystery—the history of water on Mars and the planet’s potential as an extraterrestrial address for life.
NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission is the first in the space agency’s Scout series, a class of spacecraft designed to be inventive but relatively low-cost in furthering Mars exploration.
October 27th, 2005
Canadian weather station to look for signs of life on Mars CBC News
Canadian innovation will be the main scout in NASA’s next lander mission to Mars. A Canadian-designed weather station will play a lead role in answering questions about the planet’s geology and climate. “We are now just learning that those environments, to our great surprise, do support microbes,” said Victoria Hipkin, a planetary scientist at the Canadian Space Agency.
June 3rd, 2005
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission Begins Launch Preparations
NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains. NASA’s Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present. Today’s announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major milestone followed a critical review of the project’s planning progress and preliminary design, since its selection in 2003.
March 12th, 2005
Mars to get a piece of Pullman The Daily Evergreen
If all goes right, in June 2008, a small piece of the Palouse will be stabbing into the northern polar ice cap of Mars.
Pullman-based Decagon Devices Inc., founded in 1983 by former WSU soil scientist Gaylon Campbell, has 44 employees researching, creating and marketing products that have applications in foods, pharmaceuticals, biology, forestry, soil sciences, and now, researching Mars. The Phoenix Lander is planned to land May 2008 in the northern polar region of Mars, and expose the upper few feet of surface material using a robotic arm to find the ice discovered by the Odyssey mission in 2002.
July 22nd, 2004
Mars Scout Mission Going Straight to the Source Design News
On May 25th, 2008, the world may finally know if life exists on other planets. Or at least that’s the hope of the scientists behind NASA’s Phoenix, the first Mars Scout Mission scheduled to launch in August of 2007. Rising out of the design and discovery of previous Mars missions, the Phoenix will travel to the lower latitudes of Mars to analyze the abundant and accessible ice discovered in 2002 by the Gamma Ray Spectrometer. “Water is the building block of life,” says Project Manager Barry Goldstein. “On Earth, life is everywhere. Our hope is that we will discover some of the building blocks of life in the ice on Mars.”
October 22nd, 2003
The Phoenix Scout: Red Planet Detective
As a flotilla of Mars-bound probes nears their target, scientists and engineers have begun work on the Mars Phoenix lander, the flagship spacecraft for NASA’s Scout line of innovative and econo-class Red Planet explorers.