[meteorite-list] NASA's Phoenix Spacecraft Commanded to Unstow Arm

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 17:22:29 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <200805290022.RAA06930_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-087

NASA's Phoenix Spacecraft Commanded to Unstow Arm
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
May 28, 2008

Scientists leading NASA's Phoenix Mars mission from the University of
Arizona in Tucson sent commands to unstow its robotic arm and take more
images of its landing site early today.

The Phoenix lander sent back new sharp color images from Mars late
yesterday. Phoenix imaging scientists made a color mosaic of images
taken by the lander's Surface Stereo Imager on landing day, May 25, and
the first two full "sols," or Martian days, after landing.

The panorama, now about one-third complete, shows a fish-eye perspective
from the camera, a view from the lander itself all the way to the
horizon. Phoenix adjusts its color vision with "Caltargets," calibrated
color targets on disks mounted on the landing deck. Its color vision
isn't quite like human color vision, but close.

"These images are very exciting to the science team," said the Surface
Stereo Imager co-investigator Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University. "We
see the polygons we're looking for, and we're very excited to fill in
the context with more site pan images that go beyond the workspace."
Images to complete the panorama are planned today and tomorrow, Sols 3
and 4, Lemmon said.

"We appear to have landed where we have access to digging down a polygon
trough the long way, digging across the trough, and digging into the
center of a polygon. We've dedicated this polygon as the first national
park system on Mars -- a "keep out" zone until we figure out how best to
use this natural Martian resource," Lemmon said.

Phoenix will use its robotic arm to dig first in another area seen in
the panorama, an area outside the preserved polygon.

Robotic arm manager Bob Bonitz of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., explained how the arm is to be unstowed today. "It's a
series of seven moves, beginning with rotating the wrist to release the
forearm from its launch restraint. Another series of moves releases the
elbow from its launch restraints and moves the elbow from underneath the
biobarrier."

The robotic arm is a critical part of the Phoenix Mars mission. It is
needed to trench into the icy layers of northern polar Mars and deliver
samples to instruments that will analyze what Mars is made of, what its
water is like, and whether it is or has ever been a possible habitat for
life.

"Phoenix is in perfect health," JPL's Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project
manager, said Wednesday morning, May 28.

The robotic arm's first movement was delayed by one day when Tuesday's
commands from Earth did not get all the way to the Phoenix lander on
Mars. The commands went to NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as
planned, but the orbiter's Electra UHF radio system for relaying
commands to Phoenix temporarily shut off. Without new commands, the
lander instead carried out a set of activity commands sent Monday as a
backup. Images and other information from those activities were
successfully relayed back to Earth by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Tuesday evening.

Wednesday morning's uplink to Phoenix and evening downlink from Phoenix
were planned with NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter as the relay. "We are
using Odyssey as our primary link until we have a better understanding
of what happened with Electra," Goldstein said.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona
with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed
Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space
Agency; the University of Neuachatel, Switzerland; the universities of
Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the
Finnish Meteorological Institute.
For more about Phoenix, visit http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu .

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Guy Webster 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov

Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson
shammond at lpl.arizona.edu

2008-087
Received on Wed 28 May 2008 08:22:29 PM PDT