There is water on Mars, could there ever be life? This is the question that scientists have been asking for a long time. On July 30, 2008, POT announced that the lander Phoenix found water on the red planet since then, modules sent from Earth have delved little further into life on the neighbor.
With 664 total kilograms and the lander with 350 kilograms, Phoenix was launched from Cape Canaveral on August 4, 2007. Its scientific instruments included a robotic arm, a microscopy, electrochemical and conductivity analyzer, an advanced thermal and gas analyzer and an image generator, among others.
Phoenix made course corrections on August 10 and October 30, 2007, and on April 10 and May 17, 2008, reaching the north polar region of the red planet on May 25, 2008, in the so-called Green Valley. of Vastitas Borealis.
As the aerospace agency NASA describes, “It was the first successful landing of a stationary soft lander on Mars since Viking 2, some 32 years earlier.”
The work of NASA’s Phoenix lander on Mars
From May 31, Phoenix began taking samples of Martian soil, looking for ice. NASA notes that on June 19 mission scientists concluded that clumps of glowing material in the DodoGoldilocks trench, excavated by the robotic arm, they were probably water ice, but the material evaporated four days later.
NASA’s official announcement occurred on July 30, 2008. What did the agency explain?
“Based on an analysis (by the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer instrument, TEGA) of a sample collected by the lander, there is water in Mars”.
After the discovery was made official, the media began to speculate about life on the red planet. NASA stated that it “neither confirmed nor refuted the possibility of life on Mars.”
The final chapter of the mission
To the joy of the find, the end of the mission continued. The 90-day mission, originally planned by NASA, ended at the end of August, but was extended until September 30.
On the 12th of that month, the lander took a new sample, which it mixed with an aqueous solution from Earth. Early results suggested that the soil on Mars was “alkaline, composed of salts and other chemicals such as perchlorate, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and potassium.”
The weather began to affect Phoenix, and dust storms covered several of its instruments. On October 28, 2008, the lander entered safe mode, due to insufficient sunlight and poor weather conditions.
After November 2, 2008, all communication with Phoenix was lost. NASA announced that his work ended on November 10, trying to contact him again in December. By May 25, 2010, the aerospace agency announced that the Phoenix project had formally ended.