Posted on 05/27/2008 6:34:04 PM PDT by blam
Six meters is a wasteland.
Obviously due to a lack of funding.
Mr. Bush, time to reward this NASA failure with more of our tax money...just like you did when the Columbia crashed !
.
There is nothing wrong with Phoenix. The MRO in orbit had a radio glitch. The orbiter is used to relay commands, they can also use another orbiter named Odyssey.
spaceflightnow.com
FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2008
1810 GMT (2:10 p.m. EDT)
A new image from the camera on Phoenix’s robot arm has revealed what could be ice or rock exposed by the exhaust from the probe’s landing rockets, Mission co-scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis told a news conference this afternoon. More pictures will be taken to determine what is this flat exposed material.
A short circuit has been discovered within the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument but scientists are hopeful they can work around the problem. The instrument will analyze soil samples dug up by the robot arm.
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/
In the meantime, take at look at the sublimnation properties of briny ice:
This could be interesting. They are definitely looking for organics and the story about the short circuit in the analyzer might be giving them some maneuver room. Or it might be straight reporting and no conspiracy stuff happening.
I hope they equipped them with some duct tape. That fixes everything.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=692504&id=1&qs=N%3D4294689550
Title: Evaporation Rates for Liquid Water and Ice Under Current Martian Conditions
Author(s): Sears, D. W. G.; Moore, S. R.; Meier, A.; Chittenden, J.; Kareev, M.; Farmer, C. B.
Abstract: A number of studies have been concerned with the evaporation rates under martian conditions in order to place limits on the possible survival time of both liquid water and ice exposed on the surface of Mars. Such studies also aid in assessing the efficacy of an overlying layer of dust or loose regolith material in providing a barrier to free evaporation and thus prolong the lifetime of water in locations where its availability to putative living organisms would be significant. A better quantitative understanding of the effects of phase changes of water in the near surface environment would also aid the evaluation of the possible role of water in the formation of currently observed features, such as gullies in cliff walls and relatively short-term changes in the albedo of small surface areas ('dark stains'). Laboratory measurements aimed at refinement of our knowledge of these values are described here. The establishment of accurate values for evaporation rates and their dependence on the physical conditions of temperature, pressure and energy input, is an important benchmark for the further investigation of the efficacy of barriers to free evaporation in providing a prolonged period of survival of the water, particularly as a liquid.
I had no idea of the mission of this spacecraft aside from digging for ice until I heard the Linda Moulton Howe interview with one of the program engineers on Coast. An unlikely source of information possibly, but the emphasis on detecting organics, and they have a microscope in case they might have some fossils scooped up, is kind of surprising. The engineer mentioned 3” NYT headlines as a possibility.
On the other hand, scientists would be excited if all they find is salty ice. I find it interesting that a few days ago they promised to provide “raw pictures as they arrive”, now it appears they’ve shut off the very site that provides these pictures.
When you're working on the cutting edge of the capabilities of human technology, you're going to see crashes like this. That's part and parcel of exploration.
Know what percentage of ships sank en route to the New World?
spaceflightnow.com
FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2008
Here is the official press release from today:
TUCSON, Ariz.— Scientists have discovered what may be ice that was exposed when soil was blown away as NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars last Sunday, May 25. The possible ice appears in an image the robotic arm camera took underneath the lander, near a footpad.
“We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be seeing exposed ice in the retrorocket blast zone,” said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., co-investigator for the robotic arm. “We’ll test the two ideas by getting more data, including color data, from the robotic arm camera. We think that if the hard features are ice, they will become brighter because atmospheric water vapor will collect as new frost on the ice.
“Full confirmation of what we’re seeing will come when we excavate and analyze layers in the nearby workspace,” Arvidson said.
Testing last night of a Phoenix instrument that bakes and sniffs samples to identify ingredients identified a possible short circuit. This prompted commands for diagnostic steps to be developed and sent to the lander in the next few days. The instrument is the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer. It includes a calorimeter that tracks how much heat is needed to melt or vaporize substances in a sample, plus a mass spectrometer to examine vapors driven off by the heat. The Thursday, May 29, tests recorded electrical behavior consistent with an intermittent short circuit in the spectrometer portion.
“We have developed a strategy to gain a better understanding of this behavior, and we have identified workarounds for some of the possibilities,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead scientist for the instrument.
The latest data from the Canadian Space Agency’s weather station shows another sunny day at the Phoenix landing site with temperatures holding at minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) as the sol’s high, and a low of minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit). The lidar instrument was activated for a 15-minute period just before noon local Mars time, and showed increasing dust in the atmosphere.
“This is the first time lidar technology has been used on the surface of another planet,” said the meteorological station’s chief engineer, Mike Daly, from MDA in Brampton, Canada. “The team is elated that we are getting such interesting data about the dust dynamics in the atmosphere.”
The mission passed a “safe to proceed” review on Thursday evening, meeting criteria to proceed with evaluating and using the science instruments.
“We have evaluated the performance of the spacecraft on the surface and found we’re ready to move forward. While we are still investigating instrument performance such as the anomaly on TEGA [Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer], the spacecraft’s infrastructure has passed its tests and gets a clean bill of health,” said David Spencer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., deputy project manager for Phoenix.
“We’re still in the process of checking out our instruments,” Phoenix project scientist Leslie Tamppari of JPL said. “The process is designed to be very flexible, to respond to discoveries and issues that come up every day. We’re in the process of taking images and getting color information that will help us understand soil properties. This will help us understand where best to first touch the soil and then where and how best to dig.”
It’s impossible to tell if they have ice or rock in the image. But this spacecraft is equipped to analyze that, and so far they are just getting ready to dig. They have not gone silent at this point.
Are you saying they are already fairly convinced they are gonna find something?
Thanks for the transcript. Since then there has *probably* been another download of images, which we are not being presented with.
They expect to find ice near the surface. The arm is 7.7 feet long, so in the top two yards they would hit what they need. They are prepared to identify organics and fossils. The ice is expected since surface ice has already been seen and identified in that region.
It’s early yet. I would listen to Coast for Hoagland reports. He is in contact with the program and highly suspicious of all things NASA.
Hoagland is intelligent, but his reasoning is suspect. He droned on and on for how long about the “robot head” he thought he saw on the moon pics.
I emailed him and C2C and directly challenged them. Where are the arms? Where are the legs? Where’s the batteries?
If you took 100 sewing machines and dropped them onto Mars or the moon, for sure over time they would degrade. But you would be hard pressed to find a single, solitary piece of a sewing machine somewhere.
More likely, you’d see a pedal here, and next to it a spring, and then maybe a bit away a pully, you know what I mean.
Plus his ramblings about hyperdimensional physics (which he never fully explains) get a little tedious.
HOWEVER - he has loads and loads of contacts. It wouldn’t surprise me at all that if they did find something, he would be among the very first to know.
All true. But he comes up with things you would never even suspect. He is batting about 0.000 lately, but he encourages interest and discussion, which is a lot more than NASA is doing.
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