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Arizona Governor Visits Phoenix Mars Team Working at UA

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This image shows the trench informally named "Snow White" taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on July 21, 2008, during the lander's 56th Martian day, or sol, since landing. It was taken after the arm had scraped clean an area that includes the area that was rasped earlier on Sol 56. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University )

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Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (left) and UA's Peter Smith wear 3D glasses to view panoramic images of the Martian surface taken by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. Smith, principal investigator for Phoenix, hosted Napolitano at the Phoenix Science Operations Center in Tucson on July 21, 2008. It was the governor's first visit to the center science landing second visit to the center and the first visit since landing. Napolitano and Smith viewed stereo panoramic images taken by the lander's Surface Stereo Imager on five adjacent screens that display the images 11 feet tall and 70 feet wide. (Chelsea Hodson)

The lander was working a 33-hour workshift on Mars when Gov. Napolitano visited its science operations center in Tucson.


By University Communications
July 22, 2008

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano visited the Phoenix Mars Mission Science Operations Center at The University of Arizona Monday to see how the mission was progressing.

The UA's Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator, showed Napolitano panoramic images taken by the Surface Stereo Imager, or SSI, on the lander. The panoramas were projected onto five adjacent screens that displayed the images 11 feet tall and 70 feet wide.

Smith said that seeing the large-sized images made a big impression on the governor.

"I think she had an out-of-this-world experience," he said.

It was Napolitano's first visit to the facility since the spacecraft landed on Mars on May 25. She had previously visited in February.

On Mars, Phoenix early Tuesday finished its longest work shift of the mission. The lander stayed awake 33 hours, completing tasks that included rasping and scraping by the robotic arm, plus atmosphere observations in coordination with simultaneous observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"Our rasping test yesterday gave us enough confidence that we're now planning for the next use of the rasp to be for acquiring a sample to be delivered to TEGA," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. TEGA is Phoenix's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, an instrument that heats samples in small ovens and uses a mass spectrometer to study the vapors driven off by the heating.

As preparation for that sample delivery in coming days, the Phoenix team developed plans to command the lander Tuesday evening to conduct 80 scrapings of the bottom of a trench informally named "Snow White." The scraping is designed to freshly expose frozen material and ready the surface for using the rasp.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the UA with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

 

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