Earlier this year, Gov. Janet Napolitano made a visit to the Science Operations Center. Napolitano speaks to (left to right) UA President Robert N. Shelton, Michael Drake, director of Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Peter Smith, principal investigator of the Phoenix Mars Mission.
Gov. Janet Napolitano will visit the Phoenix Mars Mission Science Operations Center on Monday for a tour of the facility and a briefing on the status of the mission. This is the governor’s first visit to the operations center since the lander reached the Red Planet in late May.
Napolitano’s visit and briefing will come just as the team operating NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander continues tests of a motorized rasp, which will produce and gather shavings of frozen Martian ground.
The planned test is a preparation for putting a similar sample into one of Phoenix's laboratory ovens in coming days. The instrument with the oven, the Thermal and Evolved- Gas Analyzer, called TEGA, will be used to check whether the hard layer exposed in a shallow trench is indeed rich in water ice, as scientists expect, and to identify some other ingredients in the frozen soil.
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of The University of Arizona with project management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, located in 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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Johnny Cruz
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