Galleries / Will the Phoenix Lander End Up a Hero-bot or a Pile of Trash?

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Eliza Strickland; published May 22, 2008

Phoenix Landing?

A Soviet Crash

The Viking Arrival

Plummet to the Pole

To the Great Beyond

Spirit and Opportunity Triumph

Sunday's Attempt

<p>NASA's latest robot explorer, the Phoenix Mars Lander, is <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/">scheduled to land</a> this Sunday, and mission control is bracing for the "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWiXL_qdn0">seven minutes of terror</a>" (video) that define the final descent and landing. Of all the attempts to land a craft on Mars, 55 percent have failed, leading past researchers to talk about a "Mars Curse." </p><p>The roster of failures includes the predecessor that the Phoenix most resembles, the Mars Polar Lander, which also used retro-blasters and a parachute to slow its descent. As zero hour nears for the Phoenix, we look back at the dismal failures and spectacular successes of earlier Martian explorers.</p>

<p>The USSR's Mars 2 made the first attempted landing on the Mars surface in 1971. It carried all the necessities: sensors to study the atmosphere, television cameras, and a pennant displaying the Soviet coat of arms (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Coat_of_Arms">hammer and sickle all the way</a>). A small rover was attached to the lander by a 50-foot umbilical cord, and was intended to navigate the surrounding terrain on a pair of skis. </p><p>But the rover never had a chance to test its slalom skills. The parachute didn't deploy during the lander's descent and Mars 2 crashed on the surface. In the USSR's next attempt, the Mars 3 made a successful soft landing but stopped broadcasting 20 seconds later.</p>

<p>NASA had hoped to land Viking 1 on the Martian surface on the U.S. Bicentennial but the attempt was postponed when the first landing site was judged too rocky and dangerous. On July 20, 1976 the Viking 1 made the first successful Mars landing, and began <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/viking/images_mm_archive_1.html">transmitting photos</a> of the barren landscape 25 seconds after touchdown. </p><p>It lasted for 6 years, finally failing because of a human error: engineers who were attempting to update its software inadvertently wrote over data that instructed the Viking on how to point its communication antenna towards Earth. Unfortunately, Marvin the Martian hasn't helped nudge it in the right direction.</p>

<p>NASA's <a href="http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/lander/">Mars Polar Lander</a> was supposed to search for water ice near the Martian south pole, but it lost contact with mission control during its descent in December 1999. While it's not clear what went wrong, one theory is the lander's software detected the vibrations when the its legs unfolded during descent and mistakenly thought the shaking was caused by the impact with the planet's surface. That little misunderstanding could have caused the Polar Lander to cut off its descent engines when the vehicle was still 130 feet above the surface, which is a surefire way to junk a really expensive piece of equipment. </p><p>In the wake of this failure, NASA cancelled its next scheduled Mars probe.</p>

<p>Named after the ship that brought Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, the British-built <a href="http://beagle2.open.ac.uk/index.htm">Beagle 2</a> was supposed to mark Europe's belated entry into the Mars exploration game. The lander was built relatively cheaply (it cost about $120 million), but it had a lot of cultural capital: The mission's call sign was composed by the rock band Blur and the test card used for visual calibration was a painting by Damien Hirst. </p><p>Alas, all those great expectations came to nothing in December 2003, when the Beagle 2 lost communication just after its deployment from the orbiting mothership, before its entry into the Martian atmosphere. Its fate is unknown.</p>

<p>Those plucky little NASA rovers! The robotic pair landed on opposite sides of the planet in January 2004, and have far exceeded their expected lifespans of 3 months. Instead, over 4 years later, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/index.html">Spirit and Opportunity</a> are still trucking over the terrain, snapping photos like tourists and digging trenches in the dirt. </p><p>The crafts that held the rovers were cocooned in airbags during their landings, which allowed them to bounce and roll over the surface. Once the rovers rolled out, they began exploring craters and hillsides, and eventually discovered gullies that may have been carved by liquid water during a warmer era of Martian history.</p>

<p>The Phoenix is too heavy to use airbags in its landing, so it must rely on retro-rockets and a parachute to bring it in for a safe landing on an arctic plane near the Martian north pole. If the Phoenix makes it to the surface, it will continue NASA's mandate to "follow the water," and will use a robotic arm to dig for water ice. The Phoenix will try to determine whether conditions for primitive life ever existed on the planet by scrutinizing soil and ice fragments under a microscope and heating samples in tiny ovens, looking for evidence of liquid water in the past. </p><p>NASA engineers say they've learned from each past failure, and the public is apparently feeling bullish about the Phoenix's prospects. In the <a href="http://ppx.popsci.com/security/view.php?symbol=SAFELAND">PopSci prediction exchange</a>, a share of the Phoenix "Safeland" stock is currently selling for $60.25.</p>

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