Nasa probe sends Mars pictures
- 00:01:35
- ITN
Nasa probe sends Mars pictures
Historic images from Mars have been sent from a NASA spacecraft that landed in the planet's northern polar region on Sunday.Engineers and scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) cheered after the touchdown signal was detected from the Phoenix Mars Lander.Project manager Barry Goldstein said of the landing: "In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly as it went. It went right down the middle."The first images sent back from Phoenix showed one of its feet sitting on Martian soil amid tiny rocks and a view of the horizon of the arctic plain while another showed that the lander's solar panels had deployed.Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere after a ten-month, 680 million-km (423 million-mile) voyage through space and kept in contact with Earth through the orbiting Mars Odyssey.It's the first successful soft landing on Mars since the twin Viking landers touched down in 1976. Nasa's twin rovers, which successfully landed on Mars four years ago, used parachutes and cushioned air bags to bounce to the surface.Phoenix will now begin 90 days of digging to look for evidence of life. It will initially take in the sights during its first week on the planet and will talk with ground controllers through two Mars orbiters, which have already started relaying data and images.The lander also will study whether ice ever melted at some point in Mars' history when the planet had a warmer environment.Scientists do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the Phoenix landing site because it's too frigid, but they say that if raw ingredients of life exist anywhere on the planet, they likely would be preserved in the ice.Phoenix, however, cannot detect signs of alien life that may exist now or once existed.Phoenix avoided the doom of its sister spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, which in 1999 crashed into the south pole after prematurely cutting off its engines.The Polar Lander loss, along with the earlier loss of an orbiter the same year, forced Nasa to overhaul its Mars exploration program.
ITN | May 26, 2008
