Phoenix Mars Mission: Onto the Ice

The latest attempt for humans to touch Mars is nearing its target.

Well, it's this search for life on Mars that's really the excitement of the mission.

The odds of success are dismal.

I think that the science that the mission will return will be outstanding.

The Phoenix Mars Mission has only one chance to land and one chance to discover water and life on the Red Planet.

We're getting to the hard part now.

Hundreds of mission scientists and engineers agonize while millions of other earthlings dream.

[radio transmission/camera shutter click/rocket noises] [radio transmission/camera shutter click/rocket noises] [radio transmission/camera shutter click/rocket noises] Main engineers start.

Two, one, zero and lift off.

On August 4th, Saturday morning, 5:26 AM we had the most beautiful launch you ever saw.

And that orbit around the sun is going to take us all the way out to the orbit of Mars where we've carefully timed it so that Mars and the spacecraft will come together.

...data in 10 seconds.

Phoenix will travel 422 million miles over nine months to get to Mars.

It has been nearly a decade since NASA attempted to land on Mars due to a series of failed missions.

This is a rare second chance.

The Phoenix arose from the ashes of the catastrophic Mars Polar Lander and uses many of the components from that mission and the canceled Mars Surveyor Mission.

Shortly after launch a TCM is on tap, a trajectory correction maneuver.

Have you turned yet?

In 30 seconds.

If we didn't do this burn today, we'd actually miss Mars by about 100,000 kilometers.

It's not aimed at Mars to begin with because when we launch the spacecraft off the Earth, there's a piece of that that's called the third stage and that's basically on the same trajectory as the spacecraft is directly after launch.

It's not clean as well as the spacecraft for Earth organisms and overall contamination.

So we intentionally bias the launch vehicle's target so that third stage won't hit Mars.

...one, mark.

We can verify that we are at the burn attitude for TCM2.

Awesome.

We can confirm that it was a very good burn from the Doppler.

It is fractions of a sigma off.

The burn was very nearly as designed.

All stations Phoenix GNC.

Comm.

communicates that we've begun the return sloop.

That's another 15 degree sloop, take about 40 seconds.

I think we're going pretty much where we aimed, which is really good news.

Feels great.

Very good.

We've got a long way to go.

We still have, what, seven months.

But every one of these milestones that we can put behind us always feels good.

All stations Phoenix systems... Before the stationary lander can begin touching, tasting and sniffing for signs of life, the international team must learn how to command and operate their instruments, remotely, blindly while waiting 24 hours for results.

Not unlike trying to teach a one-arm person to tie their shoes, over the phone.

In early October the team gathers to practice at the Science Operations Center in Tucson, Arizona.

The exercise is formally called an ORT, operational readiness test.

As we promised yesterday, this is going to be an off nominal ORT, the intentional part is...

This is probably the trickiest part of my job is to create this illusion for them in a way that they are on Mars.

So we have a test bed that's very good in a lot of ways.

Well, we've changed the whole environment of the test bed this time around and it's all based on the Hi-Rise images of the landing site that we expect to set down in at the end of May.

So what we had to do was go out and get a number of rocks that were of the correct size and the correct distribution.

They're going to discover that there's a partial failure that has some fabric kind of flopping up in the way of unstowing the robotic arm.

Let's find out.

What's the time stamp on it?

This is a good thing to check.

What I want them to juggle is given that it's not obvious how to deploy the robotic arm, whether to do something heroic really fast with taking risks in doing so or whether to defer that a day and move other payload activities up forward in time.

Our big concerns are landing safely.

We're still maximizing our landing site for safety and science return.

We are of course training the crew for all the aspects of the mission and we're basically preparing ourselves for what's going to happen May 25th.

On that date Phoenix has one chance to survive EDL, entry, descent and landing, seven minutes of terror while the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere, slows down while descending and then land safely on the surface.

More than half of all landed missions to Mars have failed.

If Phoenix survives the landing, the team will use six onboard instruments to conduct their experiments for the scheduled 90 day mission.

The TEGA or thermal and evolved gas analyzer will sniff out organics and compounds in the Martian soil and ice.

The microscopy, electrochemistry and conductivity analyzer or MECA has a probe that will measure humidity, two microscopes and a wet chemistry lab that will taste the soil for chemical properties like acidity, saltiness and composition.

The robotic arm will touch Martian soil and deliver samples to the instruments.

There's a weather station aboard and two cameras, one, the stereoscopic imager atop a mast, another attached to the arm.

It's the first image acquired with the robotic arm camera after the launch of Phoenix so what you're seeing is the inside of the scoop being illuminated by the illumination system of the robotic arm camera.

It tells us first of all that we can still take an image after launch, which is a bigger thing than people normally realize because a launch is a very violent thing.

Lockheed Martin in Denver operates the spacecraft under the command of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

While everyone wants a safe journey and landing, no one likes a safing event.

The Phoenix is trained to turn itself off and go into the safe mode when something unexpected and possibly catastrophic happens.

We had one safing event.

That turned out to be due to a cosmic ray hit so that was an expected condition.

The vehicle is doing great.

The health of the vehicle is wonderful.

We have done a lot of the payload checkouts, then we'll go through another series of in-cruise calibrations with the payloads and then we get close to our preparations for EDL where it gets really exciting.

It will be intense.

It will be a very tense buildup and it goes very quickly.

It's extremely difficult, it is very difficult what we're trying to do here and you can't get over confident.

Once you get over confident, that's a sure sign of failure.

What Phoenix is trying to do is first to land successfully and then to accomplish its science goals.

Their aim is to assess both the climate and geology of Mars, also to determine if life ever existed on Mars and whether it could be habitable in the future.

To be habitable water is critical.

NASA's interplanetary mantra is "Follow the water".

In order to achieve all this Phoenix's payload is full of intricate and precise instruments, none more so than TEGA.

The TEGA instrument itself is actually doing quite well.

We have two versions.

There's the flight model which is on its way to Mars right now.

The other version, the engineering model, we keep here in the laboratory and that's one that we use for testing all of our command sequences on and make sure that when we command the instrument it does what we want it to do.

Sometimes it has a nasty habit of doing what we tell it to do rather than what we want it to do and of course we run these tests so we can fix up and make sure we tell it what we want it to do.

This is another opportunity to make sure that what we're running is consistent with what we've modeled and tested in the past to make sure that we're not going to exceed those current limitations on the spacecraft and inadvertently mess somebody's else's experiment up or the mission in general.

If you hit start right up at the beginning of this and it's proceeding...

In charge of the science portion of the mission is the Principal Investigator, Peter Smith.

He brings to the Phoenix Mission his gut-wrenching lessons from the failed 1999 Mars Polar Lander mission.

Part of being a PI, it's a little bit of being a psychologist because people do get stressed and they do get anxious and they do worry that the years that they've put into this mission won't return the kind of wealth of science that they had hoped or the engineering excellence that they expected to get and so people do stress out and it is my job to try and calm the waters and make sure Mr. A and Mr. B are actually talking to each other again.

Truthfully I've enjoyed it an awful lot, not so much I'd want to do it again right away but it's been a heck of a good experience for me.

We're on our way to Mars and we're really worried about the landing more than anything.

Looking forward to the landing requires a hard, soul-searching look back at the past, the failure of the Mars Polar Lander, MPL.

The most probable cause for the MPL failure was premature shutoff of the descent engines.

There was a vulnerability in the software design that allowed the flight computer, when it started looking at the three legs, when it started that poll the switch picked up and it sensed that and then terminated the thrust and then the vehicle fell the rest of the way.

So that was what the review board has uncovered.

We went much further.

There's probably other things that MPL was at risk of failure for that had not been identified in the 1999 time frame.

We pulled those things out of the design and we fixed them.

You learn more from your failures than from your successes.

You may have been successful but for the wrong reasons.

You might have been lucky.

Your failures really give you pause to reflect on what did we do, what did we do well, what should we have done better.

One of the most successful Mars orbiter missions is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO.

A camera onboard called HiRise has been recruited to help find the best spot for Phoenix to land.

The landing site is very, very, very flat, which is what they want and it's what they want for two reasons.

One for the safe landing but second one of the reasons it's flat may be the history of water and water/ice which is what they're there to study.

This has been analyzed in great detail.

The chances of a failure due to a rock is less than one percent.

We were planning a picture at the predicted location of Phoenix within a day of its landing.

Potentially there could be a problem and potentially the images could help solve the problem.

Now if there was no HiRise and if they had landed in the original site, their chances are still better than 50% that it would have succeeded and in fact we've imaged the past landing sites of the Viking Landers, for example, and there was a lot of rocks in those areas and basically we got lucky.

And we could have gotten lucky again but it's much better to know what you're dealing with and not rely on luck.

To reduce the dependence on luck, Phoenix relies on NASA's 40 year heritage of missions to Mars.

Peter Smith's family legacy provides him with the foundation needed to lead this mission.

My father discovered a cure for Yellow Fever so his scientific career as a medical researcher was something that was just taken for granted in my house.

But my mother on the other hand, who knew nothing about science, was an opera singer and when her friends came over, they were all musicians.

So I always thought I'd do something great but by the time I was 40 I wasn't doing it and I was thinking, "Well, what about fate.

Maybe it's passed me by."

But things have turned out fairly well for me.

I have a wonderful wife that keeps me balanced.

She and I love to do things together and when I come home, I'm home.

Me, I'm working the clay all the time, kind of reverted back to 3rd grade and Peter keeps me back into thinking.

No one believes me but barnacles are actually a crab.

It's a huge benefit I get to reap in the fact that I'm learning all about Mars and geology and atmospheric science.

It's something I never would have had the opportunity to be involved with.

But you always like geology.

I've always been a rock hound, that's definitely true.

So it's no accident that Dana and I really get along well both in the science side and the art side.

That's something I think we both treasure.

On May 25th, 1961, President John F. Kennedy boldly challenged the nation.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

He also eluded to even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon.

47 years later to the date that exploration will be Phoenix landing on Mars.

With only 27 days to go, the team is practicing for the last time their one chance at landing safely.

GPL attitude systems voice check.

I read you five by five.

Today what we're doing is we're actually practicing for landing and gong through the operations for the first couple days on the surface of Mars.

What we try to do is we make this even worse than it is most likely to be in real life.

Just want to make sure that it's up and running before cruise stage separation.

The spacecraft is designed to survive a whole range of environmental excursions like less dense atmospheres or denser atmospheres, that kind of thing.

As far as component failures or parts on the spacecraft that might fail, the spacecraft is what's called single-fault tolerant meaning that any single component, if it fails, can cause the failure of the mission.

Mission manager did advance and is affirmative.

The engineering challenge that we've signed up to here is by far the hardest and most challenging endeavor that we do in this industry right now.

15 seconds from a nominal touch down time.

I copy.

Thank you.

It's not often that you get a second chance in life and it's even less often that you get a second chance in the aerospace business to work on a spacecraft that's cancelled so I've considered that a great, great thing in my life that I've been able to come back and do that.

We've done everything we possibly can to reduce the risk, to really try to put us in the best position but we know that this is a very risky thing to do and we know that success is not guaranteed.

It's not like we can go into orbit and revolve around the planet looking for a nice soft spot to land in.

We're on a trajectory that's going to take us directly in the atmosphere and we're done.

There is no "no go", there is no delay.

Look it.

There's the turbo lock locking.

There we go.

Yep.

Very nice.

In seven minutes we're going to know whether it's successful or not.

Okay, copy that.

The seven minutes of terror during EDL follows years of hard work and decades of dreams.

We had a vision back in February of 2002.

"Let's follow up on this great new discovery by the Odyssey Orbiter that there's ice in the polar regions."

But following up, the quickest we can do it is six and a half years and that's a long wait.

You can see my hair's gone gray, I'm turning into an old man while I'm waiting for this mission to happen.

So now it's coming up, I'm ready and it's been hard to wait so long.

There's a lot of passion that goes into this mission.

We had a kind of a debriefing last night at the end of our training period, our dress rehearsal, and I was telling people, "This is a once in your life adventure we're on and accept that experience with your full heart because it's not going to happen again.

We only land on the Mars once and that is a thrilling adventure.

Get involved and just feel every moment of it cause, don't sit in the back and pretend it's not happening or that it's just another test.

This is real."

Welcome to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and we're about 77 hours right now from that sequence known as EDL.

We're having a press conference tomorrow to talk about the health of the spacecraft.

As we sit here today, it's really very humbling what we've gone through the past five years.

Hopefully the whole world is watching with us cause this is really a mission about the world community going to Mars.

That's the way I look at it.

Are we going to see the Northern Plains in those first pictures or are we going to be just seeing solar panels?

Today we are one day away from the entry into the Martian atmosphere and the descent and landing at the North Polar region of Mars.

If we land successfully and if we're able to do the science that we've designed into this mission, I have every expectation that we'll be able to rewrite the textbooks.

Go where there's no path and leave a trail for others to follow.

That's what Phoenix is doing tomorrow.

It doesn't get anymore exciting than this.

Welcome to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and thank you for joining us for today's final pre-landing briefing for the Phoenix Mission to Mars.

I'm Veronica McGregor.

The sky's clear.

We've been watching the weather.

Everything is set for us.

We have a sunny day.

The ret of the day is just watching and waiting.

Atmospheric entry on my mark.

Five, four, three, two, one, mark.

Expected peak heating rate in one minute and 40 seconds.

Standing by for a possible plasm blackout.

For those in another room, the question was, is what's going to happen to the lander I guess after the mission's over and whether wind and other things might move it around.

So it takes us eight hours to get up to 12,700 miles an hour and then we have seven minutes to take that velocity down to zero.

You'll see them scream and you'll probably see me scream and then I'll run off and get some champagne.

At this point in time Phoenix goes normally through peak heating.

We still have a signal by Odyssey.

Standing by for reacquisition via direct to Earth.

There's no second chance, there's no... We're not going into orbit or anything.

We're going straight in and that's our fate.

Stop of Odyssey canister data and switch to 32k in ten seconds.

Standing by for expected parachute deployment.

Yes, yes, yes.

[cheering] Hey!

Parachute deployment trigger detected.

Heat shield trigger detected.

Ground relative velocity 90 meters per second.

[cheering] Land leg deployment trigger detected.

Ground level velocity 60 meters per second.

Standing by for altitude convergence.

Radar reliable.

[cheering] Altitude 2000 meters.

Altitude convergence detected.

Altitude 1800 meters, 1700 meters, 1600 meters.

Standing by for lander separation.

Altitude 1000 meters.

The separation detected.

We have reacquired the signal.

Gravity turn detected.

[cheering] Altitude 600 meters, 500 meters, 400 meters, 250 meters, 150 meters, 100 meters, 80 meters, 50 meters.

Come on.

Constant velocity phase detected.

Altitude 40 meters, 30 meters, 20 meters, 15 meters.

Standing by for touchdown.

Touchdown signal detected.

[cheering] Landing sequence is initiated.

[cheering] Landing sequence is initiated.

Phoenix has landed.

Welcome to the Northern Plains of Mars.

So far the only confirmation of success is a collection of ones and zeroes, raw data.

It will take another 90 angst filled minutes to receive pictures of Phoenix's new home.

Hey, congratulations.

Thank you.

The pictures are going to come down in roughly two hours because we have to wait for Mars Odyssey to come around for one more orbit.

[cheering] Did you see it?

Unbelievable.

Whoa!

Whoa!

Whoa!

Fabulous!

So how'd it go?

We rehearsed over and over again.

We rehearse all the problems and none of them occurred.

It went perfectly, just the way we designed.

Yeah.

How is your goal for the Phoenix now?

What are you goals?

To get some pictures back.

We want to see Mars.

Congratulations.

While celebration engulfs JPL, in Tucson the HiRise team will spend the night scanning images covering hundreds of square miles of Mars looking for the eight foot diameter Lander while in flight.

Maybe it landed down here actually.

And so it turns out that Heimdal crater is right in the middle of our image and given the projection of the line of sight, it looks like Phoenix is about to land right into this big crater.

It's actually an illusion.

It's just landing in front of the crater.

Phoenix survives the night and has awakened on schedule and sent home a few new pictures and healthy, vital signs.

Another historical feat is then marked when the keys to the mission are handed over from JPL headquarters to the engineers and scientists 500 miles away.

Hello again from the Phoenix Mars Mission Science Operations Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

I'm Sarah Hammond.

U of A is the first public university to lead and operate a mission to Mars.

The whirlwind first weeks of the mission are a shake down period.

All instruments must be checked out and methodically characterized.

And so we've designated some areas where it's okay for us to work.

We've designated some areas where we're going to keep it natural.

We had a bit of drama here yesterday.

There was an anomaly on the MRO spacecraft.

There it is.

In color it stands out remarkably well against dark red Mars.

And you'll see in the initial image that the bio-barrier is draped over our elbow.

We're not going to rush anything.

We're going to be very deliberate in our steps.

The Canadian team is walking on moon beams today because all three of our instruments that we've provided are up and running.

We sent commands to the spacecraft to unstow the robotic arm and today I'm ecstatic to let you know that it was successful.

Well, we still very much like our landing site.

One of the filaments appears to be shorted out.

This was a very proud moment for we Canadians as Canada is so nicely displayed.

These are the ten sols that have shaken my world.

One door is partially open but that's not going to impede us at all.

The other problem is that on this arm we don't have any contact switches.

And after seven shakes, some of the material has gone inside and has filled the oven so this is a very exciting time for us.

Before we sign off from Tucson I want to wish all the gentlemen a Happy Father's Day this weekend.

The Lander signs itself off nightly to charge its batteries under the never setting summer sun and in the morning is roused to receive that day's instructions.

These commands are sent from Tucson across 400 million miles of space to MRO and Mars Odyssey circling above the planet.

The instructions are held until Phoenix awakens and sends up to the orbiters the results from the pervious day's experiments which have been stored in flash memory.

Traveling at the speed of light, the data then takes 15 minutes to arrive back at the computers of the anxious scientists.

It's a sequence wrought with possible hiccups.

For instance yesterday was a really particularly tough day for a lot of loss.

We didn't get about a third of our images, which is very disappointing.

But, the team scrambled and worked very hard and instead of going to Phoenix again, they went to the memory on the satellite and had Odyssey retransmit what had happened and not only did we get the missing pictures we got, it helped fill in a lot of the gaps on the other ones that we had.

So we're very excited about that.

I got a whole day's data back that was almost lost.

It was like a catastrophic...

The soil delivery for the first sample soil surprised us I think quite a bit.

It turned out to be quite a bit stickier and properties that we really hadn't fully appreciated.

That pesky soil is just beginning to give the TEGA team headaches.

The instrument was designed for and tested with an array of soils the scientists expected to encounter.

The first step is to open the protective door covering one of the eight single-use ovens.

Then soil is dumped onto an initial sifting screen to defuse individual grains.

Solitary particles are then expected to fall into a hopper and through the opening of the tiny ovens, which are about the size of a ball point pen ink cartridge.

When the anxiously awaited image from the robotic arm camera arrives moments later, it shows the discouraging news, a second door not completely open.

Can we sweep it clean?

Do you have a broom or a kind of a wiper?

I think other people should be having heart attacks.

We've had more than our share.

Yeah, yeah, you guys definitely have had...

I really, I really was convinced it was going to open all the way.

You've had the lions' share of the challenges.

And if they all end up like this first one, I think we're fine.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's a plenty big opening really.

It may be that...

The soil that TEGA hopes to eventually study inside its ovens plays a role in the study of the Martian climate.

Prevailing wind direction can be determined by specific patterns of the soil swept around rocks, but as it turns out, not on this Mars mission.

None of these wind streaks or soil behind rocks as we have seen on I think every other landing site on Mars.

The ice underneath is probably modifying the surface in some way so that if a wind streak forms it's destroyed in a very short time scale relative to the time scale it takes to form such a wind sweep.

While much of the Phoenix team continues trying to discover water, the wet chemistry experiment on MECA has brought its own water to mix with the soil.

In the quest to discover signs of life, MECA tastes the soil to quantify its chemical properties.

It is these that determine what, if anything, can live in it.

Well, there we are.

That's what it looks like.

The character of the soil and the fact that it sticks together so quickly and so strongly that it forms bridges, you can put it in a container that has no bottom and it won't fall out.

That's been new and we've had to learn how to deal with that.

Our preliminary data shows we have an alkaline soil where we are on Mars.

It's somewhere between a pH of 8 or 9.

We've also found a variety of salt components.

Things like magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, a little bit, not very much calcium.

So you'd probably have a great time growing asparagus but I don't think, strawberries wouldn't like it there.

Then I have a bunch of graphs here showing, this is magnesium.

These came out beautifully.

If we found material that was the strength of Clorox Bleach and sulfuric acid, it would have been pretty hard to imagine life.

But what we found are limits that are reasonable.

Life as we know it would not have a problem there if that material was here on Earth.

One problem for the earth-based scientists and engineers is adjusting to living on Mars time.

Each Martian day, or sol, is 40 minutes longer than Earth's, meaning the start of every work shift begins later each succeeding day or night.

Tactical mission manager is like the captain of the ship.

When everything's going well the captain has the helmsman steering and the navigator navigating and the engineer taking care of everything below decks and the captain stands around with his arms folded looking contemplative and authoritative.

I don't get a lot of time to look authoritative and contemplative.

There's a lot of material, too.

There were just two holes dug then?

Just two holes.

Yeah, okay.

On the back of the arm is this little Dremel tool, the rasp we call it and we put it down against the soil and spun a rasp which digs up material and actually puts it in the back of the scoop.

We did a rasp and then we moved over and we did a second one and it produced what looked like nice fine grain material that has a good probability of getting through the screen on the TEGA, which is, that's sort of a Holy Grail that we're sort of working toward.

You can see we got a nice little bit of material in the scoop.

So that tells us that the maneuver performed beautifully.

That's a lot of material, too.

Okay, let's get started with the midpoint meeting.

Jim, you want to take us through the spacecraft report and what we got on the pass.

Okay, TDL.

All the instruments look healthy except for TEGA who is still safed.

Trisha, do you know how the pointing was specified for the SSI images of the rasp holes?

I know they were a little lower but I'm not entirely sure.

I know Sherry's looking at that I think.

A little lower is an understatement.

You guys got lucky to have it in the image at all.

The pointing was wrong.

No, the pointing was not wrong.

The pointing was to try to get as much as the scrape area, the area we wanted to scrape so that we'd have the DEM of that area as well as incorporate the rasp holes.

It's a balancing act and that's what my job ultimately comes down to is making sure that we do the most we can without hurting ourselves and believing in ourselves so we can do more tomorrow.

The team works feverishly attempting to deliver an icy soil sample to TEGA.

The best chance to find organics on Mars lies inside the ice.

During summer the only ice to be found is under the soil and at minus 90 degrees Celsius, it is as hard as a sidewalk.

When exposed to the sun, it sublimates or directly vaporizes soon after it's dug up.

Phoenix's study of Martian water includes looking for ice not only in the soil and below the surface but sometimes on the surface and in the atmosphere.

We've been able to take humidity measurements for the first time and we're measuring the humidity near the ground and then up in the atmosphere with our robotic arm, an instrument that's placed on the robotic arm, so we can measure from the ground up to about two meters above the ground.

And we can see that it changes the further up that you go and that's really interesting because that's probably telling us something about how that water is exchanging with the surface.

We've also been able to see some frost formation day by day and even perhaps following the shadows of rocks.

These shadows lengthen near the end of the 90 day mission as the sun drops lower in the horizon.

That looks excellent.

The robotic arm and TEGA team scramble to refine soil delivery techniques.

The climate team continues to measure temperatures, clouds, wind and moisture.

The imaging teams shoot and analyze thousands of pictures near and far.

After a week of practice, all eyes focus on TEGA when the Lander phones home.

Okay, we've dirt in the oven.

Oven's the closed.

Which are we CD1?

Six.

So we're heating.

Current or voltage?

Come on.

Oh, here we go, here we go, here we go.

It's just starting to come in.

We went and did some scraping and then used the scoop mode, kind of a grab and go, got that material and then poised it above TEGA and sprinkled it in and they have an oven full signature.

So they're in the process now of analyzing the data and looking for what phase changes have taken place.

Yeah, it looks like we did close on the first shake.

So we're on our way.

We're beyond the whole issue of the TEGA delivery and now looking at the rest of the mission.

We did get the oven closed.

You did?

Yep.

Or the oven full.

Full?

Full.

But the important thing is after the third try in the last week to get a sample into this TEGA oven, we have succeeded today.

Green.

Yeah, we got a water signal.

There's something there.

Water.

Well, Bill, you discovered water again.

Yep.

There's water on Mars.

Okay, can we be happy now?

We can be happy.

Hey, this is a stellar day for us.

We have waited so long, actually a full month to get a sample into TEGA that would show that we have H2O in the ice and today is the day that we can prove that.

And now we start several days of activity to really flesh out all the impurities that are associated with this ice including minerals that have been created in water rich environment, liquid water rich environment and perhaps an organic signature?

Who knows?

That's kind of the Holy Grail for us.

I'd like to offer a toast to the TEGA team who makes sampling Mars look easy.

Salud.

Not all discoveries are so immediately confirmed or celebrated.

Last month's MECA experiment identified an especially unexpected substance, one that on Earth can be toxic.

It's detection took the team by surprise.

Get excited, guys.

Well, we are speechless.

In our first wet chem experiment we actually detected, one of the very strong signals was a signal which we at first couldn't identify.

It narrowed it down to pretty much being a Perchlorate.

At this point we're reasonably sure it is.

It changes the chemistry of Mars in some ways.

There are organisms on Earth, microbes that utilize Perchlorate as an energy, it's a high energy food.

There are plants that take up Perchlorate and store it in fact and so it doesn't have a negative impact in terms of that.

Just before the scheduled end of the mission, because of the momentous discoveries, NASA offers a 30 day extension.

A valuable TEGA oven then tries to confirm the same material though from a different trench.

Perchlorate is essentially a mixture of chlorine with a large number of oxygen molecules or oxygen atoms and so when you heat it up it decomposes and gives off oxygen and chlorine as decomposition products.

No oxygen or chlorine.

No oxygen or chlorine.

Unfortunately we didn't see the chlorine come out this time.

Well, I'll go tell Hec the news.

Okay.

We wanted to get a confirmation if we could but that's the way science works sometimes and sometimes you get questions answered, sometimes you just have to ask more questions.

Phoenix is trying to answer questions raised by previous Mars missions, all of which landed in the equatorial region.

They discovered the mineral that on Earth is used to make Epsom salt.

Phoenix, by contrast, landed in the polar region, atop debris ejected from an impact crater.

The difference in the aqueous chemistry for the soils that we have at the Phoenix site as opposed to the other five places where there are clearly magnesium sulfates.

We don't seem to have that here.

So that gets again to the unique geologic setting, being on top of a partially eroded ejected deposit and places of debris flow or a mud flow.

And then being in a zone where the ice table moves up and down dramatically as the orbit of Mars changes.

And that's fluxing a lot of water in and out and probably changing the salt chemistry of the soil.

Even with the mission extended and the delivery technique refined, Phoenix's days are numbered.

But it was designed as a terminal mission.

From the outset it was known the sun would vanish and carbon dioxide ice several feet thick would encase the Lander during the winter.

Every day the team anxiously waits for the data confirming that TEGA has filled another oven.

So I'll know the moment it starts coming.

There's less than ten minutes between the time that they actually acquire the sample form the soil and deliver it to TEGA and we have to keep that time as low as we can too.

They were able to do a practice delivery to cell zero by shading the inside of the scoop the entire time and then they collected the ice fine and it delivered successfully out of the scoop onto our screen using the shadow from the SSI instrument that passes across TEGA for a short period early the morning.

Where's our dig?

Any minute.

Oh, data.

Okay.

Data, data.

It's coming.

Come on baby.

Channelize.

We didn't, safed is false.

We're not safed yet.

Not yet.

Hang on, wait for it.

The goal for the next ten days is to fill as many of the remaining ovens as possible and then do the science and ramping on them end of September, October.

Is this going to torture us and make us wait?

Nope, there's stuff.

Hang on, it's coming.

You got something.

We have channelize that's been coming.

We did not safe and we did not fill.

That can't be.

Okay, it isn't there.

We're not sure we turned on.

It looks almost like we...

This is not a failure, that's right.

The ever sinking sun compounds attempts to successfully fill TEGA ovens.

It's one sign of the rapidly approaching end of the mission.

As the days get shorter, there's less power and time to fill ovens, to bake samples and to find signs of life.

Yeah, it's coming.

Ah, we safed.

TEGA safed.

All right.

Well, I better go tell Carl that we've got to go Plan B tomorrow.

Yeah.

Got a little bit but not very much.

That's similar to the first ones we had.

All right.

Well, I'll give Heather a call.

Maybe she knows already.

Hi, Heather.

It's Bill.

Well, we didn't get an oven full.

There was a fair amount of stuff on the screen so looks like the problem is at our end.

All right, should have GAP report.

What was Plan B?

Plan B, no one's really sure.

In late September a tantalizing glimpse of the looming arctic winter is seen for the first time ever, snow falling on Mars.

In mid October TEGA's luck changes and it successfully fills and bakes another oven.

So far we've found that we definitely have calcium carbonate.

There's a phase in there that releases carbon dioxide at very high temperatures greater than about 700 Celsius and really calcium carbonate is the only phase that can do that.

On Earth calcium carbonates like chalk and marble are formed by the deposition of fossilized sea shells and coral, past organic life.

We have other data that we're collecting at low temperatures and we see a release of carbon dioxide at low temperature.

That's really kind of interesting because it could be one of two things.

It could either be other forms of carbonates that will release carbon dioxide at very low temperatures or it might actually be organic molecules that are actually converted to carbon dioxide because the Mars soil is actually a strong oxidizing agent.

As the search continues for organics amid the toxic perchlorate, daylight and therefore power levels fall to new lows and the mission itself changes.

Though granted a second extension by NASA, the majority of team members return home to trim expenses and to tend to other commitments.

Housed at the University of Arizona the TEGA team already is home.

We're planning something we haven't done yet on the surface and that's to enrich the rare gases in what we call the gas enrichment.

We got data?

Not yet.

It's not down yet?

No.

And so today we're running a test in the laboratory to make sure we've got the parameters for controlling the temperature down just right so when we uplink it to Mars things have a high probability of working well.

We're going to be doing this on Monday when it's not clear there's even going to be enough power left for us so w know we're not going to get a second chance on Mars.

We don't know for sure we're even going to get the first chance but we want to make sure we test things out in the lab to give us a better chance of making it work.

Okay, Doug, if you would bring up the historical and strategic plan for me, please.

Welcome to Sol 147, planning for Sol 148.

Well, yesterday we had a very busy day in light of our current power state.

We did a whole lot yesterday.

On November 2nd, all communication from the Lander abruptly ceases.

Though expected, the death of Phoenix due to insufficient solar power is hastened by the cold, by cloudy skies and by dust storms, the very soil Phoenix has studied for months.

We've declared the end of mission.

It's a bittersweet experience for me.

We were calling it the hospice mode as we were getting towards the end and that's the way it felt.

You're losing a loved one.

When we wrote our proposal we asked for a 90 day mission plus a 60 day extended mission, 150 days.

We lost our spacecraft on day 151.

So we got 100% of what we asked for.

Scientists are a little greedy.

We wanted 110%.

The landed phase of the mission is over but the real science discovery is just beginning.

We've collected all the data we're going to get and now it's time to do a complete analysis.

We haven't quite plumbed the depths of what we've learned but by gosh we're after the truth of the Northern Plains of Mars and whether it's what we hoped to find or didn't hope to find, we'll find what's there.

It's not only finding what's there, it's also sharing the discoveries with the world.

In mid December the team of scientists gathers in San Francisco to officially present its preliminary findings.

Gathered at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union are more than 10,000 prestigious, international planetary and earth scientists... and the press.

Before they present their findings, they must first figure out what they have found.

Perchlorate.

What in the world is perchlorate doing to everything?

Nobody knows what magnesium sulfate is in the press world.

Well, they can't eat organic compounds on Mars because there aren't organic compounds there.

How do we put this together for tomorrow's presentations?

It's certainly provocative.

No.

What?

No.

We don't know if they lack sulfur or not.

So I've put 80% confidence here so that we don't have to feel like this is being written in the history books.

Maybe the ice cap is less important than we thought.

I don't want to get to the end of my presentation and have deleted every single one of my conclusions so that I can't say anything at the press conference.

I would like to have some conclusions and we're going to try another slide.

Next slide.

We found that the soil was laced with perchlorate like some of the most arid soils on Earth.

It's not 100% certainty.

I said 80% confidence.

I think Bill's point was probably not.

Mike's point was we need snow.

Aaron had some point and then I forget what it is and Carol's saying yes, so what are we actually saying?

Hope you brought your sleeping bag, Ray.

We're going to be here all night.

I would say as unequivocally as one ever does in this business I've determined that we've got calcium carbonate.

And what we found is that five percent of the soil material is calcium carbonate while the other being discovered was snow of course coming down to the surface.

We see frost on the ground.

We see snow falling that sometimes doesn't get to the ground and sometimes does.

There's a lot of lab work to be done here still.

We're really needing to do more lab work.

We're really presenting preliminary results.

We found largely a wind-blown soil.

The land form is paraglacial and differentially eroded but the bulk of the soil that we're looking at has come in from the sky.

Perchlorate identified at the one percent level.

Well, I don't want to quibble but I think it's more like .7 percent.

And we now know that there are tiny amounts of salt and a large amount of something called perchlorate.

Phoenix is really a stepping stone in the pathway of finding evidence for habitable zones and then perhaps later life on Mars.

What we're trying to do over the next few months in our future work will be to try and get that last piece in this puzzle clicked into place.

Now, one year after Phoenix landed, pieces of the scientific puzzle that is Mars Exploration are rapidly starting to fit together, time to reflect on the success of the Phoenix Mission.

Since we've completed our mission in November, there's been two very interesting discoveries about Mars.

One is that the ice apparently still exists near the surface down to much lower latitudes.

The second thing is finding methane coming out of the ground on Mars and trying to understand the implications of that.

Our mission is now in the throes of winter.

We certainly never tested our equipment at those temperatures so it's very likely it'll fail but on the other hand there's some chance it won't.

And because of that we'll be listening in October to see if we can hear any attempts from the spacecraft to communicate with the orbiters that are currently orbiting Mars.

If we are lucky enough to recover this spacecraft, we still have one oven left that has not been used.

We can potentially use one of the chemistry cells.

We can use some of our microscopic cells and our cameras work and the weather station works.

And finally there's no reason why the arm wouldn't work either so we can still dig.

So we've probably got 75% of our capability left if it all comes back in a functional form.

That's really, that's my greatest hope, that we do get to see it again.

Rise yet again, it's a good name, isn't it, Phoenix.

In that case I'm going to sit on the other side of the table so I can see more of the faces I'm arguing with here.

Uh, the biggest surprise.

Well, I can't talk about that.

Fair enough.

We'll hear about it at some point.

And then how do you think...

It's a big surprise.

Do you understand what they want to do?

Yes.

Does it scare the hell out of you?

Not that bad.

Evil scientists have worked for years on this problem.

Learn more about the Phoenix Mars Mission on the web at this address.

Phoenix Mars Mission: Onto the Ice is available on DVD.

To order, visit us online at shopPBS.org or call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.