so.. is the next new, bitch'n backcounty ski area and
terraine park gonna be on mars? if so, what are lift
tix prices and it is ski-in/ ski-out ot do you gotta
ride the shuttle? where will be the best apre' hang
out after the lifts close? heard the airfare's kinda
steep, and the rover is slow and can only take to
people @ time to top of backcountry bowl. i may opt
for potillo, instead. 93F but jonesing...hmt
--- Ron Baalke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-090
NASA'S Phoenix Lander Robotic Arm Camera Sees
Possible Ice
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
May 30, 2008
TUCSON, Ariz.-- Scientists have discovered what may
be ice that was
exposed when soil was blown away as NASA's Phoenix
spacecraft landed on
Mars last Sunday, May 25. The possible ice appears
in an image the
robotic arm camera took underneath the lander, near
a footpad.
We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be
seeing exposed ice in
the retrorocket blast zone, said Ray Arvidson of
Washington University,
St. Louis, Mo., co-investigator for the robotic arm.
We'll test the two
ideas by getting more data, including color data,
from the robotic arm
camera. We think that if the hard features are ice,
they will become
brighter because atmospheric water vapor will
collect as new frost on
the ice.
Full confirmation of what we're seeing will come
when we excavate and
analyze layers in the nearby workspace, Arvidson
said.
Testing last night of a Phoenix instrument that
bakes and sniffs samples
to identify ingredients identified a possible short
circuit. This
prompted commands for diagnostic steps to be
developed and sent to the
lander in the next few days. The instrument is the
Thermal and Evolved
Gas Analyzer. It includes a calorimeter that tracks
how much heat is
needed to melt or vaporize substances in a sample,
plus a mass
spectrometer to examine vapors driven off by the
heat. The Thursday, May
29, tests recorded electrical behavior consistent
with an intermittent
short circuit in the spectrometer portion.
We have developed a strategy to gain a better
understanding of this
behavior, and we have identified workarounds for
some of the
possibilities, said William Boynton of the
University of Arizona,
Tucson, lead scientist for the instrument.
The latest data from the Canadian Space Agency's
weather station shows
another sunny day at the Phoenix landing site with
temperatures holding
at minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees
Fahrenheit) as the sol's
high, and a low of minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus
112 degrees
Fahrenheit). The lidar instrument was activated for
a 15-minute period
just before noon local Mars time, and showed
increasing dust in the
atmosphere.
This is the first time lidar technology has been
used on the surface of
another planet, said the meteorological station's
chief engineer, Mike
Daly, from MDA in Brampton, Canada. The team is
elated that we are
getting such interesting data about the dust
dynamics in the atmosphere.
The mission passed a safe to proceed review on
Thursday evening,
meeting criteria to proceed with evaluating and
using the science
instruments.
We have evaluated the performance of the spacecraft
on the surface and
found we're ready to move forward. While we are
still investigating
instrument performance such as the anomaly on TEGA
[Thermal and Evolved
Gas Analyzer], the spacecraft's infrastructure has
passed its tests and
gets a clean bill of health, said David Spencer of
NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., deputy
project manager for
Phoenix.
We're still in the process of checking out our
instruments, Phoenix
project scientist Leslie Tamppari of JPL said. The
process is designed
to be very flexible, to respond to discoveries and
issues that come up
every day. We're in the process of taking images and
getting color
information that will help us understand soil
properties. This will help
us understand where best to first touch the soil and
then where and how
best to dig.
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the
University of Arizona
with project management at JPL and development
partnership at Lockheed
Martin, Denver. International contributions come
from the Canadian Space
Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland;
the universities of
Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck
Institute, Germany; and the
Finnish Meteorological Institute. For more about
Phoenix, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.
Media contacts: Guy Webster 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
2008-090
