REMEMBER WHEN

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A NASA spacecraft landed in Mars’ northern polar region to begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost for evidence of the building blocks of life.

Less than two hours later, the Phoenix Mars lander beamed back four dozen images, including one of its foot sitting on soil amid tiny rocks.

Others included the horizon of the arctic plain and ground with polygon patterns, similar to Earth’s permafrost regions.

”Absolutely beautiful,” said Dan McCleese, a chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

”It looks like a good place to start digging.”

Cheers swept through mission control after a nailbiting descent.

The lander deployed a parachute and thrusters to brake in a tense seven minutes from 20,400km/h to manage a soft landing.

After a nine-month journey from Earth, the Phoenix managed a perfect landing in a relatively flat target area, said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at the mission’s control centre in

Pasadena, California.

Working in the flat circumpolar region known as Vastitas Borealis, Phoenix probed the icy ground for signs of liquid water and organic, lifesupporting minerals.

Given that Mars’s polar region is subject to Earth-like seasonal changes, scientists thought that, like on Earth, the Martian arctic might have a geological record of a warmer, habitable climate.

”Our whole mission is about digging,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona, before the landing.