“Food miles alone are not a reliable indicator of
environmental impact.” — RiCH PiRog, PAgE 11
Humans Nutcracker Man was Jell-O fan
Body & Brain Let there be sight
Life Understudies for extinct species
In the News Environment Not all insects want more heat
Atom & Cosmos Hasta la vista, galaxy
Matter & Energy Transistor meets its match
story one
Searching for
habitability on
the Red Planet
Phoenix will dredge
the Martian landscape
with its robotic arm
and onboard instruments
Phoenix is scheduled to land on Mars on
May 25, probably on a well-mapped, flat plain
thought to be dense with subsurface ice.
By Ron Cowen
A NEW EMISSARY FROM EARTH IS SET TO
parachute onto Mars on May 25, making
it the first craft to land on the Red Planet’s
north polar region and the first since the
1970s built to find life-friendly places.
NASA’s $386-million Phoenix Mars
Lander features a robotic arm—similar
to a backhoe — that will dig trenches up to
half a meter deep in the frigid soil, scraping
and scooping up samples of ice that previous satellite studies indicate lie just a few
centimeters beneath the surface. Phoenix will deliver those samples to onboard
detectors — eight miniature ovens, four
laboratory wet cells and a mass spectrometer — to determine if the region contains
water, complex organic compounds and
sources of energy that might support life.
The main question the craft seeks to
answer: “Is there any place on Mars at all
where life could exist today?” says Phoenix
principal investigator Peter Smith of the
University of Arizona in Tucson.
“Phoenix represents a significant step
in understanding water on Mars,” notes
planetary scientist Jack Mustard of Brown
University in Providence, R.I. In following
up on the discovery by the Mars Odyssey
mission of water-ice just beneath the polar
surface, Phoenix will “quantitatively ana-
lyze the mineral and volatile constituents
of the soil,” he says. “It will also measure
isotopes of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and
nitrogen, which will be unique and important measurements for understanding
processes relevant to habitability.”
Phoenix got its moniker because it
inherited instruments from the Mars
Surveyor Lander, canceled in 2000, as
well as detectors similar to those on the
Mars Polar Lander, lost in 1999. Scheduled to land at 68° N, the same latitude as
northern Alaska, Phoenix will function
for three months but might last twice as
long, until the shorter, colder days of winter hamper the solar-powered craft. »
