May 25th is the target date for the landing of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, whose mission is to explore the Martian arctic plain. NASA adjusted the lander’s trajectory in April to refine the final approach to the planet.
Check out this really cool video of the landing and post-landing phase of the mission.
Launched in August 2007, Phoenix is a stationary lander equipped with a trench-digging robotic arm to bite into the Martian surface and scoop up samples of nearby soil and water ice. The probe’s top-mounted suite of ovens and wet chemistry instruments are designed to help determine whether its arctic plain landing site – a region similar in latitude to central Greenland or northern Alaska on Earth – could have once proven habitable for primitive life.
I’m looking forward to a safe landing for Phoenix. This will be the first Mars lander to use a retro-rocket to cushion the landing since the Mars rovers landed using the balloon-bounce landing technique over 1500 ‘sols’ (Martian days) ago.