Missions | Universe Today

Until humans can actually set foot on the Red Planet, the next best thing would be a sample return mission, to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth. A sample return would exponentially increase our knowledge and understanding Mars and its environment. And in order to pull off a mission of this magnitude, international cooperation might be required, and in fact, may be preferred. The International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG), organized an international committee to study an international architecture for a Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission concept. After several months of collective work by scientists and engineers from several countries worldwide, the “iMARS” group is ready to publish the outcome of its deliberations and the envisioned common architecture for a future international MSR mission, and they will discuss their findings at an international conference on July 9 and 10 in France.
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The "vibrating" done to get the first Mars arctic soil sample into Phoenix's TEGA (Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer) oven may have caused a short circuit that could happen again the next time the oven is used, perhaps with fatal results. A team of engineers and scientists assembled to assess TEGA after a short circuit was discovered in the instrument, and came to a fairly disheartening conclusion. “Since there is no way to assess the probability of another short circuit occurring, we are taking the most conservative approach and treating the next sample to TEGA as possibly our last,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator. Therefore, the Phoenix team is doing everything they can to assure the next sample delivered to TEGA will be ice-rich.
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The GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) spacecraft blasted off on June 11, 2008, and after acclimating to the cold reaches of space, the instruments on board are now powering up and have sent back signals to Earth indicating that all systems are operational. Meanwhile back on Earth, several bases of operations for the telescope are gearing up for processing data from the various instruments.
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What do black holes, magnetars and supernovae have in common? They all emit X-rays. But it's difficult, if not impossible to study certain aspects of the X-ray emissions from these powerful objects. And there's much we don't understand about how black holes distort space-time around them, or how magnetars affect their surroundings, or how cosmic rays are accelerated by shocks in supernova remnants. A proposed new NASA mission called Gravity and Extreme Magnetism (GEMS), will use a new technique to study what has been unattainable until now. GEMS won't study the X-ray emission of these objects directly, but will build up a picture indirectly by measuring the polarization of X-rays emitted from these violent regions.

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For the first time, a spacecraft has detected signals from both stars of a binary pulsar system in X-rays. XMM-Newton is watching both stars radiate pulsating X-rays, providing scientist with the perfect laboratory for high-energy physics and a never-ending source of intriguing physical problems. The binary pulsar PSR J0737-3039 was first spotted by astronomers in 2003 in radio wavelengths, but now X-rays can be used to investigate this system in greater detail.
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Phoenix's scientific team team held a press conference today to officially make their big announcement, which was fairly evident from pictures on the Phoenix website late yesterday: They found what they have been looking for. "It is with great pride and lot of joy that announce today we have found the proof that we have been seeking that show that this hard, white material is water ice," said the project's principle investigator Peter Smith. The image here shows a trench dug by Phoenix's robotic arm scoop that exposed a white area, and left a couple of small chunks of white material, which scientists thought could possibly be ice. A few days later, the ice is gone. "In the course of sitting through the cold and very dry Martian environment for several days, it sublimated," said Mark Lemmon, co-investigator on the Phoenix's Surface Stero Imager. "The ice went away into vapor without any melting taking place." But how do the scientists know for sure this is water ice?
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Phoenix scientists have been keeping an eye on the white material uncovered in a trench dug by the lander's scoop. Dice-size nuggets of the bright material have vanished, convincing scientists the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it. The image here is a "movie" showing the material disappearing after four days. "It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."
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The Phoenix lander began digging in an area called "Wonderland" early Tuesday, taking its first scoop of soil from a polygonal surface feature within the "national park" region that mission scientists have been preserving for science. The lander's Robotic Arm created the new test trench called "Snow White" on June 17, the 22nd Martian day, or sol that Phoenix has been on the Red Planet. However, all of the newly planned science activities will resume no earlier than Sol 24 as engineers look into how the spacecraft is handling larger than expected amounts of data.
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NASA recently took some of its most promising new concepts for living and working on the moon and tried them out in a moon-like location near Lake Moses, Washington. Scout robots, rovers, cargo carriers, cranes and spacesuits endured sand storms and temperature swings to help test out the prototypes and prepare for future lunar expeditions. Although conditions on the moon will be much harsher, one investigator said, "It's as close as we can get in a terrestrial environment to the lunar environment." Above is the Mobile Lunar Transporter, which includes unique features that allow each of its six wheels to move independently, giving the vehicle the ability to drive in any direction. The human drivers stood in turrets on the "trucks."
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Here's something you don't read everyday: The University of Colorado at Boulder returned nearly $3 million in cost savings to NASA for the SORCE mission, the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment, which studies how the sun's variation influences Earth's climate and atmosphere. The university designed, built and controls the mission. Tom Woods, principal investigator of SORCE said the cost savings were the result of a small, efficient management team, thorough pre-launch testing of prototype instruments and tight schedule adherence during the development phase. "We have a long history at LASP (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, in Boulder) in mission and instrument development and spaceflight management and operations, and our experience clearly showed here," said Woods. "We didn't cut any corners, we made the best use of the available budget, and we are extremely pleased to be able to return this substantial cost savings back to NASA."
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The Phoenix lander team revealed the latest images from the mission at a press briefing on Friday. This first image shows an area dug by Phoenix's scoop, which disclosed a bright surface just a few inches down, which may be ice. "There's still some debate about the bright material," said Phoenix Principle Investigator Peter Smith. "Not everyone is sure that this is ice. So there's been some debate on our team, centering around that perhaps there's a salt layer just under the soil that also would be bright. Everyone does believe there's ice under the surface, and whether this is ice or not is the question. The other question is, is this thick ice that goes down deep beneath the surface, or is this a thin layer and we'll be able to scrape through? So being able to scrape with our scoop is a high priority for us."
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For more than 17 years the Ulysses spacecraft studied the sun, pioneering solar science and defining our knowledge of the sun's heliosphere. But on July 1, the mission will end. The spacecraft has been slowly "dying" due a dwindling power supply which can no longer keep the spacecraft warm enough. But Ulysses lasted almost four times its expected lifespan and has forever changed the way scientists view the sun and its effect on the surrounding space.
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When Bill Boynton announced at a Phoenix lander team meeting earlier today that the troublesome, clumpy Martian soil now sits, finally, within the TEGA "oven" on Phoenix, the room erupted with cheers and a standing ovation. Boynton then launched a rendition of "Shake, Shake, Shake" he had cued-up on his laptop, and started dancing. If that mental image doesn't make it clear, getting the soil into TEGA is big, and the entire Phoenix team is excited about the accomplishment. Boynton, who leads the investigations with the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer instrument, and his team have been trying various methods for several days to get the stubborn soil through a screen and into TEGA. The instrument will heat the soil and analyze the gases released to check for water vapor and other chemicals in the soil.
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Phoenix "vibrates" to move soil through a screen.

New motto for the Phoenix spacecraft: If at first you don't succeed, then dust yourself off and try again. Since the Martian soil is proving to be a challenge for the Mars lander, engineers will try a new technique to try delivering the frozen arctic soil into the TEGA, or the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Anaylzer, designed to bake and sniff samples to identify key ingredients in the soil. The soil is clumping together, and won't pass through a screen that brings it to the ovens on board the spacecraft. Engineers operating the Robotic Arm on Phoenix Lander are testing a revised method they are calling the sprinkle technique.
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Even though New Horizons is the speediest spacecraft ever to travel through our solar system, it still has a long way to go on its voyage to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. However, New Horizons hit an interplanetary milepost yesterday, June 8, by crossing the orbit of Saturn. At 1.5 billion kilometers or 935 million miles (10.06 astronomical units) distant, that's a mission's worth of space for most spacecraft. But for New Horizons, it's just another interplanetary point on its voyage to the outer reaches of our solar system. As a testament to New Horizons' speed, the spacecraft set a record for the fastest transit to Saturn by any spacecraft, making the trip in two years and four months. Voyager 1, the previous record holder, made the journey in approximately three years and two months.
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The crew of the STS-124 mission has been busy installing equipment on the International Space Station, fixing a toilet, and trying out the latest robotic arm that's part of the shiny new Kibo module. The image above shows some of the new additions to the station, which just keeps growing in size with every mission. The mass of modules shown are: the Japanese Pressurized Module (left), the Japanese Logistics Module (top center), the Harmony node (center), the Destiny laboratory (right) of the ISS, and the forward section of Space Shuttle Discovery that is docked to the station.
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"To see a world in a grain of sand…" – English Poet William Blake

The Phoenix science team tested out the lander's Optical Microscope by imaging grains of sand and dust particles, some as small as one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. These are the highest resolution image ever of small soil particles from another planet. "We have images showing the diversity of mineralogy on Mars at a scale that is unprecedented in planetary exploration," said Michael Hecht of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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NASA's Mars Odyssey has been switched into "safe-mode" after possibly being hit by energetic particles from the Sun, or by cosmic rays. Acting as one of two relay satellites between Earth and Phoenix, this has hindered commands to be sent to the lander, thereby slowing its progress. Phoenix is just about to start scence digging operations on the surface (Martian regolith is shown in the Phoenix test-run scoop of material, pictured). It seems likely that Odyssey will remain in the protective safe-mode until the weekend whilst operators try to understand what caused the problem. For the time being, the second relay satellite NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will try to take up the slack and keep the lander in contact with mission control…
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Phoenix's first dig in the Martian soil. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona

The Phoenix lander used its robotic arm scoop to dig up soil on Mars surface for the first time during its activities during its seventh day on the Red Planet. The image above shows the hole dug by Phoenix, and below is a picture of the scoop itself, with the Martian soil inside.
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Take a look at this image sent back from the Phoenix lander. On Friday, Phoenix scientist Ray Arvidson said there may be ice directly under the Phoenix lander, exposed in the blast zone by the retrorockets used for Phoenix's soft landing. Friday's image showed a small portion of the exposed area that looks brighter and smoother than the surrounding soil. On Saturday, Sol 5 for Phoenix on Mars, a new image shows a greater portion of the area under the lander. Scientists say the abundance of excavated smooth and level surfaces adds evidence to a hypothesis that the underlying material is an ice table covered by a thin blanket of soil. This is just what the Phoenix mission was hoping to find, and how incredible to land directly over your goal.
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Scientists from the Phoenix mission say the lander may have exposed ice just beneath Mars surface when soil was blown away as the spacecraft landed last Sunday, May 25. The possible ice appears in an image the robotic arm camera took underneath the lander, near a footpad. The robotic arm was moved so the camera could peer beneath the lander to make sure Phoenix's footing is secure before any digging operations start. In the top center of the image above is the area in question.

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Phoenix's Surface Stereo Imager (SSI) has finished its initial survey of the area surrounding the Phoenix lander, and returned the images to Earth for completion of the first panorama, seen above. "The panorama takes your around the entire scene," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith. "We see this "hummocky" terrain, with troughs in between the hummocks. In the background we can see the backshell and parachute." Also visible are disturbances in the soil caused by the landing. And one of the most important aspects of the image shows the robotic arm now up and off the lander, with its scoop in the ready position. Flight Software Lead Matt Robinson reported, "The arm is busted loose now and is raring to go!"
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Europe's Mars Express orbiter picked up the signal that Phoenix was transmitting as it descended to Mars' surface on May 25. The data from the Mars Express Lander Communication system (MELACOM) tracked Phoenix and the signal was received on Earth soon after the Phoenix landing. The Mars Express Flight Control Team has now processed the signals, and the sounds of Phoenix descending are audible, loud and clear. ESA says the signal was tracked successfully, even during the expected transmission blackout window of the descent, until the lander was out of Mars Express’s view. The transmission blackout window is caused because of ionization around the probe, which builds up as the lander descends through the atmosphere and only very weak signals come through.
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The UHF radio on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that had gone into standby mode yesterday was successfully restarted. The orbiter was then able to receive information from the Phoenix Mars Lander late Tuesday evening and relay the transmission to Earth, which included images and other data collected by Phoenix during the mission's second day after landing on Mars. The radio system used by the orbiter to communicate with the lander experienced an undetermined "transient event" early Tuesday and shut itself off. This prevented sending Phoenix any new commands from Earth on Tuesday. Instead, the lander carried out a backup set of activity commands that had been sent Monday, which included taking additional pictures of itself and the landing site. Above is one of the raw, unprocessed image the lander took of itself.
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The UHF communications radio on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has switched to standby and was unable to relay instructions to the Phoenix lander for its activities for sol 2, which included unstowing its robotic arm. The problem arose at 0608 PDT on Tuesday. MRO did receive the sol 2 sequence from Earth – meaning the communications link between Earth and MRO continues to operate normally. But subsequently MRO reported that there had been a “problem with the handshake between MRO and Phoenix,” said Fuk Li, manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. A 'handshake' is the set of signals the radios on the two spacecraft send each other to establish a data-communications link.
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