The Phoenix spacecraft is ready for the dangerous landing on Mars

For seven fateful minutes on May 25, the Phoenix spacecraft will cross the Martian atmosphere and land in the Arctic Circle

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft is preparing for the final leg of its journey to begin a three-month mission to taste and smell a handful of buried soil and ice. The spacecraft is expected to land on Mars on May 25.

Phoenix will reach the edge of the Martian atmosphere at a speed of almost 20 km/h. Within seven minutes, it will go through a series of events aimed at slowing down to 8 km/h, the speed at which its three legs will touch the ground. The landing confirmation is expected to arrive on Earth around 19:53 EST (02:53 Israel time on May 26).

"Landing a spacecraft on Mars is a difficult and dangerous mission," says Ed Weiler, NASA's Assistant Administrator for Science Missions at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Less than half of the attempts made by various countries all over the world to launch spacecraft to Mars ended successfully."

Rocks large enough to spoil the landing or prevent the solar collectors from opening are the biggest known risk, but images from the high-resolution camera on board the MRO spacecraft will be detailed enough to show rocks even smaller than the lander, which will help reduce the risk.

"We've covered the entire landing area with the camera so far," says Ray Arbidson of Washington University in St. Louis, chairman of the Phoenix Landing Working Group. ."

NASA personnel integrated into the Phoenix equipment from a spacecraft whose launch was canceled in 2001 after a similar spacecraft crashed during a landing attempt in 1999. Researchers who proposed in 2002 to build the Phoenix mission wanted to use the equipment as a resource to push the launch of a new scientific mission.

Earlier, also in 2002, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft orbiting Mars discovered an abundance of subsurface water ice in large areas in the high latitudes of Mars. NASA chose the Phoenix proposal over 24 other proposals and became the first mission under the SCOUT program from a series of selected missions. "Phoenix will land at a point much more north than any previous mission," says mission manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's JPL. A in Pasadena, California.

The Phoenix mission is designed not only to explore the permafrost region and to determine whether this region, which covers about 25% of the surface of Mars, can support life," says Peter Smith, Phoenix's principal investigator from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The lander, which will receive its energy from solar collectors, will operate a 2.5 meter long robotic arm that will be used to extract samples from the underground ice and the soil that lies above the ice. A laboratory inside the lander will analyze the samples. The cameras and a weather station made in Canada will provide additional information about the environment of the landing area.

One of the goals of the research is to assess whether the weather conditions at the landing site allow the existence of bacteria. The composition and structure of the soil above the ice can provide clues as to whether the ice ever melts in response to long-term climate cycles. An important question is whether the samples that will be retrieved will contain carbon-based materials that are potential building blocks and food for life.

The spacecraft was jointly developed by JPL and Lockheed-Martin. The international contributors to the program are the Canadian Space Agency, Neusthal University in Switzerland, the Universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and the Meteorological Institute in Finland.

For information on the NASA website