For eons Mars has been the object of our affection.

Our desire to learn about and especially touch Martian soil has spurred many attempts to reach the Red Planet.

Most have failed.

On November 5th, 1964, Mariner III was launched but a failure in the protective shroud aborted the mission.

Undaunted though a new team is set to carry on with our lofty dreams.

Let’s pick a, a target on the feature.

The risk is great, the rewards greater.

Rising from the ashes of previous failures is the Phoenix Mars Mission.

Funding for this program was provided by Desert Program Partners.

♪ music ♪ Ignition.

Lift off.

Roger.

1-3 seconds.

We’re on our way.

Mariner IV blasted off from Cape Canaveral determined to discover evidence of life on Mars, the driving force behind most Mars missions.

In 1964, just seven years after Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to escape Earth’s atmosphere, we were on our way to Mars using state-of-the-art slide rules and specially designed chalk boards, this mission actually reached it’s target.

The spacecraft is flying toward Mars, about to pass within 6,000 miles of its surface.

Mars resembles Earth more than any other planet in our solar system.

Mariner’s goal was to help answer the question on nearly everyone’s minds.

Does life exist elsewhere?

Picture number 11 shows craters three to seventy-five miles across.

The picture suggests that Mars has never had an ocean or substantial atmosphere.

The Mariner IV pictures neither demonstrate nor preclude the possible existence of life on Mars.

Even then scientists knew there wouldn’t be life without water or its frozen version, ice.

The Phoenix Mars mission has a single leader, the principle investigator who is the brains and brawn behind the mission.

The primary cheerleader, shepherd and orchestrator of all those gizmos, gadgets and lingo, Phoenix is led by a veteran of previous Mars successes and failures, Peter Smith.

First goal is to land safely on Mars.

That’s one we’re working really hard on now.

And the second goal is to dig down under the surface soil to try and find an ice layer.

This is an ice layer that was discovered by Odyssey in February of 2002 and has yet to be actually verified that it’s truly there.

NASA’s theme has been "Follow the water".

There isn’t any water in the equatorial zone, it’s dry.

So we thought we’d take them literally and we’d find a place where there is water, even in the form of ice.

And while it’s ice today it may not always have been ice.

We have ways by looking at chemistry and mineralogy to understand the history of that ice.

Two back-to-back NASA Mars missions went awry in the late 1990s.

The Mars Climate Orbiter failed likely due to navigational errors and the Mars Polar Lander failed during the challenging entry, descent and landing phase.

The next scheduled mission was cancelled.

NASA regrouped and after considerable introspection initiated the Scout program.

At a lower cost and driven by science goals, the resourceful Phoenix Mission is Scout’s first attempt.

We took our instruments from Mars Polar Lander and Mars Surveyor ’01 and we are using the Mars Surveyor ’01 spacecraft.

It seemed to us that having that kind of huge amount of heritage was really a, a big advantage.

It gets you far ahead of a blank piece of paper where you’re designing spacecraft from scratch and so we thought of it as bringing it, bringing a new bird out of the ashes of the flames that killed the old one, you know, we called it the Phoenix bird.

It’s the resurrection symbol.

Unlike the Mars Rover mission still driving around elsewhere on the planet, Phoenix is a fixed site lander and can only sample within eight feet of where it touches down.

Fortunately in 2006, the hugely successful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or MRO began its Mars orbit.

With its HiRISE camera, short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, MRO could offer invaluable assistance to the Phoenix mission for selecting a tiny patch of real estate with only an eight foot radius.

The principle investigator behind HiRISE is the University of Arizona’s Alfred McEwen.

We got there in late northern summer so the light was fading at the latitude within its landing site so we had to, to work fast.

They did their best to pick the best landing site based on pre-HiRISE data.

The hope was that we would just image that location and confirm, yes, this is a good landing site.

So we imaged that location and found lots of rocks, boulders that they hadn’t known about and this was in October of last year so I sent, I sent Peter Smith a little Halloween card here and, with the boulders and false colors for Halloween like colors.

But these boulders here, that one is a big one, maybe three or four meters diameter, but any boulder, even some of the smaller ones at one meter, they land on top of that, that’s the end of the mission.

This was definitely a scary site for them.

So then we had sort of a race against time to define the new landing site and characterize it before it got dark at that latitude.

We only had really a few months.

This went well.

We, we took images at lots of different longitudes.

They have a latitude belt where they can land between something like 60 and 72 degrees latitude, which, which is the right latitude for having ice at the right depth.

So we took lots of samples in that band and they quickly zeroed in on one area that appeared to have fewer rocks, it was a different geologic unit, it was also, ironically the spot that Peter Smith first wanted to go to when he wrote his proposal was, was this particular spot.

Then they decided that another spot was better mainly for science in terms of the depth of the ice but then because of the rocks that trumped everything.

You’ve gotta land safely so now they’re back in that same spot, Region A they call it.

Took those images and characterized that landing site pretty well and, and by the end of the, last year even it was pretty clear that they were in good shape.

I sent Peter a new, new card for Happy New Year.

The Mars Lander will face nighttime temperatures as low as negative 100 degrees Fahrenheit at its landing site near the northern polar region.

February is a bit more hospitable in Tucson as the mission scientists gather for training, planning and updates.

Right now we are about six months prior to launch and we are in the stage where all of our instruments are in their final build and test phase and the spacecraft is, is fully built.

And then finally the science team’s job is done after 4/16 and then the sequence team comes in with the spacecraft team and works on generating, on taking those inputs from our science team... We have a system of, at the very top Level 1 requirements and mission success criteria and those are our projects agreements with NASA headquarters where we get our funding of what we have to do and what has to be in place in order for something to launch.

Right now it’s not any good because the camera model’s wrong...

If one of the instruments not in that list didn’t make it that wouldn’t be considered a mission ending type of situation.

An assemblage of seven instruments will conduct the scientific experiments on Phoenix.

The robotic arm is the only way to bring samples inboard from the surface to the devices which perform the experiments.

The surface stereoscopic imager, the SSI, serves as the eyes of the mission.

The chemical character of the soil and ice will be explored by a gas analyzer called TEGA.

Another analyzer named MECA will test the composition of the soil and with special needles determine its water and ice content.

The rest of the instruments include a camera on the robotic arm, another camera called MARDI used only during the descent and a Canadian made meteorological station MET.

The MET will peer into the atmosphere with a laser called LIDAR.

As far as Phoenix ix concerned the LIDAR will be an upward pointing instrument able to probe the contents of the atmosphere up to altitudes of 15 or 20 kilometers.

I would say virtually all the instruments on Phoenix are all based on tried and, and true, well developed terrestrial based technology in the lab or on field applications in, in terrestrial applications and, but when you take them to put on to a spacecraft, especially a specially one as, as demanding as going to Mars, then you have to immediately be aware of the mass and the size.

You, you know, to, to lift this thing and transport it these hundreds of millions of kilometers through the space really does restrict.

With Mars you have a rather small window of a couple of weeks every two years to launch and if you miss that window then you’re gonna have to wait two years.

The amount of surface wind will affect how much of a soil sample is blown away as dust and how much dirt remains for the instruments to analyze.

Phoenix will measure surface wind by means of a telltale.

It will give us some indications of both wind direction and wind speeds and it will be imaged so it will be possible to take an image and you’re, okay, now that was a strong wind and determine where, what are the correct timing to put samples into the many experiments onboard.

If one wants to get rid of the dust component, one would select the time of day where the wind is blowing heavily but if one wants a time of day with, where, or selects a time of day with low winds one would get the dust also.

The atmosphere is less than one percent of our atmosphere so there are not enough molecules to move such a device and so it had to be very sensitive but still very robust because on the way up through the atmosphere, our atmosphere, it will be exhorted to forces that are six orders of magnitude stronger than it’s supposed to measure and that was the challenge basically.

During the launch, which is the most harsh treatment that, well, everybody is having a good time opening champagne and celebrating, I will be somewhere throwing up.

I know what it’s going through at that time.

A sour stomach and sleepless nights are not uncommon at this point in the mission for all those who are assembling their own instruments.

Be back at 10:30.

What’s next?

The principle investigator is not immune.

He’s also the principle worrier.

It’s gonna be very time intensive cause getting the arm to just the right position.

From a high level view we’re in great shape.

When you look at some of the details it’s scary.

And now you can click around on the image itself just... Yeah, we don’t have any pictures of that right now.

We had two major concerns several months ago.

One was the landing site selection.

Let’s see if there’s any rack image of the same target.

There aren’t any because this is based on the Mipple data that we had from awhile ago... And the other was the landing radar.

If it doesn’t work we don’t know if we’re near the surface or far from the surface and if, if we don’t know we have to burn so much fuel to be prepared that we may run out of fuel before we get there.

We went from a rapid deviation from being on budget, on schedule, technically healthy, everything going smooth, instruments delivered right on time to a month later all of a sudden schedule’s blown, we’re out of, we’re out of money, we have technical problems that look insolvable, you know, where did this come from?

Do not trust that unless we have some, some low independent measurements.

I tried to get... For us we have another 154 days I think it is to find all the problems in the spacecraft and correct them before we launch and then after that we have no chance to do it.

We’re building the oven experiment called TEGA and they had a major setback about two weeks ago and they had to redesign it, rebuild it, requality it, all in the space of the last two weeks.

All the reworking of TEGA, the gas analyzer, happens in a spotless room at the University of Arizona.

Today we’re just a week or two away from actually delivering the instrument to Lockheed-Martin.

We had a problem with the mass spectrometer that we believe we’ve fixed and we are now testing to make sure that that repair is going to work.

TEGA stands for thermal and evolved gas analyzer and what it’s gonna do after we get to Mars is it’s going to analyze some soil that we dig up and it will heat up the soil and see if any gases are given off.

And then we actually analyze all of the gases given off from that, from the sample coming out of the oven.

We want to understand what has the role of water been in the past history of Mars and so by looking at the different minerals and seeing how they’ve reacted with water we can tell something about the aqueous environment on Mars.

And although this mission’s not actually designed to look for life we want to understand the question of habitability and whether the situation is such that ice could exist in the past.

For the TEGA instrument we can analyze eight samples and that’s all we can do.

We’re bringing along eight different ovens and they can only be used once.

The top goal of the Mars program is to search for life and the first landed mission to Mars focused very specifically on that and that was the Viking mission which flew in 1976.

And the thing was that the Viking mission found no evidence of organic compounds on Mars.

Now in fact that turned out to be a significant result because there were less organic compounds found on Mars than one would expect even from an in-fall from meteorites.

So there are less organic compounds on Mars than there are on the moon.

There are all these mechanisms at the surface that would, if there was a record of life, it would wipe it out.

So you have to dig to get to that record of life.

You have to get into the subsurface.

And the question for Phoenix is going to be can we get deep enough into the subsurface to sample that record.

Now if we are lucky enough to find organic compounds, we’ve also brought along a blank sample and that’s to make sure that if we’re seeing small amounts of organic materials we know they’re not contamination that we’ve brought with us.

Obviously we try to make things as clean as we can to avoid that possibility and that’s why we have this clean room here that we can build an analyzer with very, very little organic contamination that we have in it ourselves.

The clean room has really cost us an awful lot both in terms of the money to set up the clean room but also in terms of the time in that almost anything you do in the clean room takes probably three times as long as it would take in a normal laboratory.

Right now this is probably our most stressful time because we’re really up against the gun of delivery and we really don’t have more than a few days left and if things go wrong or if some of these repairs we’re making don’t work, there’s some chance we might not even be on the spacecraft and we certainly wouldn’t want that to happen.

If we are lucky and everything works right and we organic compounds there, I mean, we’re just gonna be going crazy and we’ll be probably drinking some organic compounds of our own.

The first instrument installed on the Lander was MARDI.

It arrived March 23rd at Lockheed-Martin Space Systems facility outside Denver, Colorado.

Delivery of a qualified instrument is its own successful landing so to speak for the instrument team and it’s a launch for the spacecraft assembly team.

Well, this one does lidar so we’ll do the card, then lidar and then MECA has its own launch... Today we would be putting four instruments on the spacecraft.

As you’re seeing we’re putting two on because one of the instruments is having difficulty in its final testing and then the order with which we have to build the spacecraft prevents us from putting the other one on so we’re, we’re replanning a little bit right now.

The biggest challenge really is that when you get down to the last set of electronics that you can build through the old technology is you’ve got no safety net.

That one is very discolored.

I wonder if we ought to snap a photo of that.

You know, if something goes wrong, if you break those or something goes wrong there’s very limited spares available.

Just cause something’s worked one time doesn’t mean it’s gonna work again so we have to be diligent every day, you know, always expecting that there could be a problem out there and making sure we find it, if it, when it’s there.

It’s really an exercise in systems engineering and optimizing the design space.

If you push on this here, something else is gonna pop up over there.

Having a planetary Lander is an entirely different endeavor than building an orbiter.

It’s essentially two different vehicles that goes through a metamorphosis in between these two primary configurations.

The real challenge between the thing is balancing the design needs of a, of a cruise vehicle and a landed vehicle into a single set of design solutions that perform all the functions.

So it’s really like doing two vehicles in one.

And what we have over here, this is, this is what’s called the back shell.

The back shell is the, the outer part of the vehicle that protects the, the lander inside of it during its cruise, cruise phase to the planet.

It protects it from all the heat and the elements of space.

It basically is, it’s a one-of-a-kind for this vehicle.

There is no other engineering models or quall units or, or anything like that.

It’s a one unit critical item so if this were to get damaged or something like that, the mission would be over with before we launch.

Most people on the mission believe that, you know, the entry descent and landing phase, that 10 minutes when you get to Mars and you go from 15,000 kilometers per second to 2 and a half meters per second in 10 minutes and transform the spacecraft from this capsulized vehicle down to a lander with legs out, you know, that’s just so much to do in such a short period of time with absolutely no margin for error.

Thank you.

Bye.

Once we get through that entry descent landing, we’ve safely on the surface, we’ve got 90 days to get things done and, you know, then time starts running out.

I worked other lander missions but I think most people will tell you that we’ve spent more time on Phoenix testing the surface phase of the mission than most lander programs typically do before a launch because we’ve got such a short window on the surface to get things done.

We have to do what we call planetary protection essays so what we do is we verify that we’re not delivering any time of spores or contaminants to the surface of Mars.

So what we do is we clean and prep the bottom, our planetary protection guy comes in and he does the sampling and then what he does is take it to his lab and he puts it in Petri dishes and he cultivates it for 72 hours to make sure that we don’t grow any kind of organisms, molds, so on and so forth.

The engineer’s function is to really provide the means for the scientists to be able to carry out their investigations.

One cannot exist without the other.

Peter Smith is our PI.

Peter’s a great guy and the bottom line is we’re putting this mission together and we’re gonna go fly this so Peter and his scientific team can get, can get the science that they’re looking for.

It’s a pretty cool thing.

If you’re an engineer it doesn’t get any better than building a lander that goes to Mars.

For myself personally the relief’s gonna come when we land, you know.

Everything up until that point is a step to getting to landing, you know.

Launch is a, is a big milestone and on an orbiting mission it might be the biggest milestone.

But on this mission, you know, having been through the loss of Mars Polar Lander, you know, I felt relieved on the day that one launched.

I’m not gonna feel relived on this one.

I know that, you know, we’re working towards the landing as much as, more so than we’re working towards a launch.

The mission is a kind of mega-team made of smaller but still grand teams.

NASA gets the mission off the ground and into space, Lockheed-Martin designed and built the spacecraft and operates it during its journey and throughout its like on Mars.

JPL handles navigation and takes over flight operations for the nerve-racking seven minutes of entry, descent and landing.

The University of Arizona is responsible for the science.

That’s armies of people, upwards of 250 people work on this mission.

Mars has been a career for some and for some families.

I’m second generation working here for Lockheed.

My father had previously worked on the Viking missions.

He worked on both 1 and 2 landers there and I, like I’d said in the past I, I worked on the 98 landers and now I get the opportunity to work on the Phoenix lander, so, and I’ve been building spacecraft here for Lockheed for 27 years.

The human aspect is what makes the whole thing work.

We have great computers.

We have great technology that help us design and fabricate but what it comes right down to is the thoroughness and the dedication of the entire team that is really necessary to put one of these things together and to understand the behavior.

After two grueling weeks testing is complete.

The TEGA team accompanies their instrument on its final terrestrial journey.

It’s been a long road but yes, definitely excited that we’re finally get on the spacecraft and go on to the next part of this mission.

There were several times where all of a sudden it just seemed like it just was not gonna happen and so we’ve had our share of disappointments and are ready for our share of excitements.

So it definitely will give all of us a sense of closure and ability to say alright, now we can focus on the next part of this mission.

We’re all pretty excited to get our lives back but our families are probably pretty excited, and our friends, are probably excited for us to get our life back too They have, for the most part I think, they think most of us have disappeared into a black hole.

The 121 pound payload of scientific instruments will eventually sit atop a lander that weighs 772 pounds.

It in turn will be encased in a Delta 2 rocket weighing over 500,000 pounds built to propel that package into the Martian atmosphere at 12,750 miles an hour.

Unlike the airbag landings of the Mars rovers, Phoenix will have a relatively soft landing, the first one since the Viking missions over 30 years ago.

Slowed at first by a parachute the craft will then land safely only with the aid of 12 thrusters and guided by that pesky landing radar.

It’s a problem that doesn’t seem to have an end to it.

We’ve been working on it for a year now.

We’ve had three or different drop tests where we drop this radar out of a helicopter and simulate landing on Mars and we’ve found problem after problem after problem.

We think we’re getting near the end but this does cause me a lot of worry.

Well, just recently we put on all of the instruments in the final configuration exactly the way they’re gonna appear on Mars so it is ready to ship to the launch site where it’s gonna be integrated into the launch vehicle.

We have a couple months to do the final integrations of the spacecraft to the launch vehicle.

We have to put fuel in it.

We have to arm the explosive devices that pull things apart as we go through the atmosphere when we finally get there and so there’s a whole series of steps that have to be made plus a lot of reviews and finally it’s closing out of paperwork.

Paperwork is a major part of a mission of this sort.

I think if you took any piece you wanted off an electronics board and pointed to a component or a mechanical piece, you could find a large packet of, of documentation that goes with that piece.

I’d have to say there may be 10 million pieces of paper associated with this mission.

For centuries scientists wondered if Mars might be covered with vegetation.

We have all seen in books and movies a lot of discussion about space travel, going to other planets, finding life on other planets and when you find that your country is actually doing such a thing and in fact it’s happening in your city where you’ve lived your whole life, people get really excited and they get behind us.

They come over, they say, "Oh, we love what you’re doing, you know, please can we be included in some way?"

And I say, "Sure.

We’re gonna have open houses.

We wish you’d come to all our open houses and see what we’re doing.

Check in."

Good afternoon everybody.

Welcome to Cinco de Mars at the Mars Phoenix science operation center.

I just wanted to let you know about our next speaker, Alfred McEwen.

...build a thing that was going to land on Mars.

Mm mm.

That’s exactly what we’re doing.

What we have here is a robot that’s gonna go to Mars.

It’s gonna be...

I wanted to see everything and this, this is the only chance we’re probably ever gonna get to see an actual spacecraft.

So today I want to tell you a little bit, remind you what the Phoenix Mission actually is, why we’re doing it.

So here’s a picture of our spacecraft.

We’re landing the old-fashioned way.

We’ve gotten rid of airbags and we’re coming down with a propulsion system.

If you were an alien invader would you come down on the Earth in airbags and bounce around like a... No.

I mean, that would be so embarrassing, so...

Assembled, wrapped and crated, the Phoenix is now ready to leave the nest and take wing.

It’s short flight to Florida is miniscule in comparison to its 422 million mile journey to Mars.

With great care, amid plenty of attention, the lander is under the safe keeping of many watchful escorts.

Today is gonna be one long day.

The spacecraft left the Lockheed-Martin facility at 4:00 am.

Our flight manifest calls for liftoff from Buckley Field at 2:00 pm.

We’re gonna land at 7:30 pm East Coat time and if everything goes well we’ll have it buttoned up in the clean room at about 11:30 East Coast time tonight.

That’s a pretty long day.

...you’ll pull out, we’ll get it into position and then once you... so probably the safe spot for them would be on the opposite side.

Overall the media ventures for Phoenix through its entire life so far has been pretty high.

We’re gonna have 13 media representatives actually flying with us on the spacecraft, local news is here in Denver and we’re gonna have some folks down in Kennedy too.

You can see the nitrogen bottles there so we keep a purge on it so it stays dry and clean.

We’re a little bit at the whim of the weather but this time of year that’s not particularly an issue.

The spacecraft is designed for deep space environment so standing out here in shirt sleeves isn’t gonna particularly be a problem.

I didn’t want to like bring it up there cause I don’t know who’s all gonna be in the aircraft right now, so.

Shipping about one week early from what the original plans were.

The testing in Denver has gone very well, might as well make the plans to get it down to Florida and give ourselves a little more time at the Cape.

Down there at the Cape it’s a really neat dynamic.

You’re down there to do one thing, is to get this vehicle ready to go.

It’s a smaller team, everyone works very closely together, it’s a very strong team dynamic when we get down to the Cape.

It’s a really neat thing to experience.

I’m relieved that we’re at this point.

We’ve taken this spacecraft apart and put it back together three times up until now and we really didn’t start putting it together for, into this configuration til just about two weeks ago, so we put the last science instrument on, I want to say around April 10th, possibly a little bit after that.

After an uneventful and sometimes sleepy flight Phoenix arrives in Florida on the same runway that the space shuttle uses.

This will be its last conventional landing.

The lander is carefully, gingerly and slowly transported to yet another clean room.

This will be its last stop until the instrument-rattling forces of the launch nearly three months away.

Not seeing the vehicle for over three weeks it looks extremely good.

I’m very, very happy that it’s here.

I’m happy that my crew’s here and the vehicle looks outstanding, just perfect.

It’s here at the Kennedy Space Center where the puzzle pieces come together and the science portion meets the delivery portion of the mission.

Final mating of the rocket and capsule and delivery to the launch pad must await final testing of the lander.

What’s next is we will be taking the heat shield off of it and we’ll be lifting off the shipping bays and going over to the spin table to do a dry spin and to find the CG and the balance of the spacecraft.

In preparation for their summer on Mars every instrument onboard and the assembled lander itself have already gone through rigorous testing, including what’s called shake and bake.

They are encased in a vacuum chamber to simulate the harsh Martian environment and then shaken vigorously to replicate the forces of launch and landing.

The instruments are designed to last for the entire 90 days of the mission before winter imprisons the lander in thick carbon dioxide ice.

MARDI however has a much shorter lifespan.

The descent camera is designed to take images as we are descending towards the surface to give us a broad overview of the landing site and also to give us higher resolution views than we could see from orbit.

The camera was designed to work and work very well for two minutes or three minutes and that was its entire job.

Not the taking of the pictures but the storing of those images has created a critical flaw.

During the multitude of tests back in May at Lockheed-Martin a major communications problem was discovered.

The news is just coming to light.

We were originally limited to about 20 images which we would have taken right after parachute descent started all the way then to power descent and then eventually to the surface.

However a recently discovered problem on the spacecraft has limited us to a single image that we will hope to take somewhere around 300 meters above the surface.

There is a computer card inside the spacecraft that my camera connects to and that card has a problem when we are, when it’s reading data from the camera at a high rate.

It loses track of the number of bytes it’s pulling off and that causes the card to reset.

That card also works with the unit that will make sure Phoenix has the correct attitude during landing.

A reset could mean that the craft lands on its head, not its feet.

After landing safely the $420 million Phoenix mission will be headquartered from the Science Operation Center at the University of Arizona, the first time NASA has allowed such off-site control.

Here in July the scientists themselves undergo testing.

We’ll start with the most important activity we had yesterday, which was the robotic arm unstow.

Matt.

There were no faults detected.

Okay.

And did you get an SSI image image of the tunnel position?

Okay.

We are conducting our first operational readiness test, which is our first full up, full scale test of what we’re going to do when we get to Mars.

So there is a set of criteria in your email, Peter?

And working as if we were really on the surface of Mars.

...usually do, there’s a particular format to talk to... Today reminds me very much of almost 10 years ago when we were preparing for Mars Polar Lander and we were doing these same type of exercises and they were not going well at all.

We have a conflict in, we already have a conflict in that...

They were very frustrated.

Today is a huge advance over what we were able to do 10 years ago.

Aren’t we upping the data rate?

Okay, so, then this can be done.

Yeah.

They haven’t heard from the spacecraft team yet.

What’s the allocation?

Well, my ... we did the go-no-go with Odyssey so we should plan on this being a 128k pass.

Since this is a virtual expedition to Mars...

Yes.

I told you flash would be the Achilles heel.

...we are running all of our observations on a computer that simulates the spacecraft to a very high degree of accuracy so when we send commands up to our simulated spacecraft, it reacts just the way the real spacecraft will react.

A replica spacecraft in a simulated landing location is out of sight and behind closed doors at the operations center.

This will be used for testing commands and communication both after landing as well as during realistic simulations like this.

Today we received data in the morning showing our first pictures of the site in front of the lander where we could dig and so we went through the process of putting all that data through the system to calculate a 3-dimensional terrain model so that we can plan out where to take our robotic arm to scoop up some dirt and then we, after looking at those pictures, the science team weighed the pros and cons of different spots of where we would dig, worked with the robotic arm team as to what’s safe to do and then from there we had a baseline to plan to go acquire a sample.

I started back with Viking Lander I and Lander II in 1976.

WE didn’t have these tools, everything was done by paper and handing things back and forth and the, the process, the interaction with people is very much the same and it’s the system end-to-end and the system with its people fundamentally but also the tools and the spacecraft and the whole flow.

Like most complex machines very few people understand how all the different parts of it work and so those very few people have to work very hard and long hours between now and landing in order to pull it off, so burn out, burn out of the people.

But they’re a great bunch of folks.

If anybody can pull it off, this group can.

When we get closer to actually doing this on Mars then the pressure of realizing that each day on Mars is costing you $4 million and you don’t want to lose one of them, and they’re very valuable, it’s not just money.

The money is just one way to look at value but the truth is it’s very difficult to get to Mars safely and once you do you want to take full advantage of that opportunity and we will.

Human testing complete, all eyes focus again on the next major milestone, the launch.

We have one more major review before launch and launch is in, I think it was 16, 16 days to launch.

We may not go the first opportunity so it might be 17, 18, 19, I don’t know but the probability is that we will launch in the first 4 days of our launch window.

So right now the spacecraft is being put onto the third stage of the launch vehicle and this is happening in the clean room about 10 miles away from the launch pad and once it’s attached to the third stage then the whole unit spacecraft plus third stage is transported over to the launch vehicle and raised up to the top, which is about 13 stories high on a, a crane pulls it up and places it on top of the rocket.

So I’m a little worried because any accident at this point is unrecoverable but of course once we launch, even today, right now, we can’t change the hardware, it’s done.

From the beginning the controlled explosion of rocket launches has always been quite a spectacle, not just for those close to the mission either, for the media, for the public, for those intimately involved with the mission and their support team.

This group around here, this is my family that’s come down to share the launch with us.

It’s, it’s, when you put so much time and effort into something like a planetary space mission it’s a big part of your life.

It’s been four years since we’ve been working on Phoenix and it’s really important to share it with everybody here.

And we’ll definitely see manatees and... We have some very interesting dinner table conversations, yeah.

So we’ll sit down for dinner and, this guy here’s got a lot of interest in science and technology, so it’s a lot of fun sitting around talking about this stuff.

You don’t even know, every night.

We connected the GCB with the XY core today.

It was a big step for Lockheed-Martin.

I’m really proud of what he does.

I’m really excited for the launch and I really want to see what comes out of this.

I think we’re looking at good things.

I’m interested to see if they find any living organisms in the dirt or soil samples or anything like that.

I think that should be interesting.

I hope everything goes right and they find what they’re looking for like water or traces of life.

When we weighed the vehicle after all the things we changed, putting on the full flight configuration, the difference from what we were expecting versus what we measured was 8 grams.

So that’s less than a 4 ounce difference.

After you launch it there’s always a period of discovery when you’re leaning how your spacecraft that you’ve worked on for four years really behaves when it leaves the nest.

As you get closer to landing day on May 25th of next year, then the, all of the urgency and all the excitement starts to build all over again.

It’s almost like going through launch again.

Blast off is scheduled for August 3rd but the destiny of the launch itself is out of the hands of the engineers, scientists and technicians and at the whim of the weather.

Lightning during scheduled fueling causes a 24 hour delay.

The team takes the news on this momentous day in stride.

You know it’s four years today that we were accepted on this project, our proposal finally accepted, and here we are ready to accomplish all the goals we set out in our proposal.

We are ready for Mars.

I’m an optimist.

I’m extraordinarily confident.

I know the team that put together all the pieces of this spacecraft, I know every one of those people, and I am truly confident that they have done a fabulous job and that Phoenix is ready to go to Mars.

Two days prior to scheduled launch, media interest peaks.

The launch team and the science team gather to give their reports and to answer journalists questions.

The Mars program science theme in this decade has been Follow The Water and Phoenix is actually gonna go land on it in the form of ice.

And as I speak I’m still hearing thunder outside so you can understand what us in the weather community has been dealing with on a day-to-day basis.

But, that’s Florida in July.

While their challenge is getting a successful landing on Mars, my biggest challenge is getting it out of Florida.

Part of the way that you control the, and improve the success of the landing event is to control your horizontal velocity, all right.

And that’s really probably the key thing for the touchdown event.

These things working together will detect the samples that are in the oven and characterize them, kind of in the same way that if you’re baking chocolate chip cookies in your kitchen at home, essentially anyone walking into the kitchen can immediately sniff and tell exactly what’s in the oven.

What you, this is the entire Mecca.

Now I remember as a kid we’d play 20 questions and you’d always ask is it bigger than a breadbox, about the size of a breadbox but sort of squatter than a breadbox, a little bit shorter.

And it’s important to note that we found a place that minimizes the risk associated with landing because we’re in a program of Mars exploration.

So using Mars Global Surveyor data, Mars Odyssey data and very importantly Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images we now have a database of 5 million rocks.

Some reporters have studied the mission more than others.

From my perspective the greatest result we can find is that there is a wealth of complex organics associated with this ice and that would give us the sense that this is the place to go to search for life on Mars.

We’d, then you’d probably want wheels and mobility and a long term mission.

We don’t have any of those things and we are just taking the first step.

And astronauts?

No, we don’t have any astronauts.

Even for the veteran scientists the main concern remains those few minutes when Phoenix escapes it’s earthly box.

I’ve been doing this since 1969 and believe it or not I’ve just seen one launch.

The launch, when it leaves, you know, you’re still worried about or concerned in fact that the upper stages are gonna work and that it’s on its way to Mars and that that will connect telemetrically with the vehicle so that’s the next phase of the mission.

This’ll be my 4th Mars mission.

I was on two other Mars missions that in fact failed.

They really are spectacular.

You first see it and it actually starts to move before you hear it and then you hear the thunderous sound when the sound actually reaches you and it shakes your body, it’s really pretty amazing and especially when you’ve got something on board that you built yourself that you... We often tend to personify these instruments and it’s hard for me not to say WE are going to Mars rather than saying IT is going to Mars.

For all of the people working on it we tend to think of it as part of us.

Scientists aren’t the only people with part of themselves finally going to Mars.

There’s something special onboard Phoenix that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with goodwill towards future Mars settlers.

Hitching a ride are the well wishes of more than a quarter of a million sky watchers.

And we’re flying everybody’s names who logged on put their name in to the surface of Mars.

This is a special DVD that’s designed to last for at least 500 years and it is actually, it’s not even bolted to the spacecraft.

It is in fact velcroed to the spacecraft.

It’s ready to go to Mars.

It was scheduled to fly on a Russian mission, which was called Mars 94, then turned into Mars 96.

Unfortunately Mars 96 never made it to Mars.

It made it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Very appropriately it’s getting another ride today on the spacecraft Phoenix.

It’s risen from the ashes.

I just can’t help imagine about who it will be who will pick this thing up and hear, and hear and see what people back in the 20th and early 21st century imagined, imagined about the world they are living.

Phoenix’s first chance to escape this planet is now less then 9 hours away.

When final preparations for what we call the mobile service tower rollback and this is the structure that surrounds and protects the rocket leading up to launch actually pulls back so that the rocket is left on the pad so it can launch into space.

If everything goes well it’s about a 30 minute process.

It’ll pull back about 10 yards and stop to make sure everything is cleared and then it’ll pull back all the way.

It’s kind of like Christmas morning, you know.

You think in your mind what it’s going to look like with the rocket, with the boosters, with the spacecraft all together and it’s another thing to see it pull back and you have this brand new sparkling rocket with this payload that’s brand new, ready to go into space and do great things.

This is the culmination of four years of hard work.

It feels great.

I have utmost confidence in our team, in the, the ULA team that built the launch vehicle and we are ready to go.

We are going to Mars.

We’ll launch at about 5:26 so I think about 3:00 am the last person will be out here and the closest person at that point will be about 1.2 miles away.

I’m in the control room along with the rest of my team and we’re doing the countdown and, you know, if anything happens to go wrong we’ll be consulting on what to do but if everything goes right I don’t have much to do at all.

I’m gonna run outside the building and watch it actually face-to-face rather than on TV.

Verifying weather conditions are go for launch.

Weathego.

...on Channel 1 the following personnel report... Good morning, how are you?

Very well, how are you?

I’m fantastic.

We’re ready to proceed with the countdown.

You go up there, you see this whole tower, you don’t even see the rocket.

I mean, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like... Ready and launch director.

Ready.

Five, four, three... Main engines start, two, one.

Whoo!

(cheering) Oh, waiting a long time for this, a long time.

Look at that.

Hey, there they go.

(cheering) How’s it feel now?

Got no words, I got no words.

It’s unbelievable.

I think what’s next is a little cider.

There you go, dad.

You gotta learn how to run this thing now, now that it’s off the ground, been spending most of the last few months just getting everything working, waving goodbye, but this is gonna be a tough thing to run.

Oh, it’s fantastic.

Four years of hard work and we finally see it to go off and head off to Mars.

It’s just, it’s just incredible.

Congratulations.

It was great.

It was a beautiful light show, I mean, it was everything.

The best launch I’ve ever seen.

It’s too bad Peter’s not here but I know he’s celebrating.

Hats off.

All right.

Another launch, not quite as important.

[cork pops - cheering] We’ve gotta wait about another hour before we know that everything is good cause that’s about when we start talking to the spacecraft but it feels good.

It feels great.

TEGA.

Yeah, whoo, whoo.

TEGA, TEGA.

Hey, hey, hey.

Well, you don’t see contrails do that too often.

No, no.

An anxious world awaits news from the Phoenix delivered by a team now themselves much less anxious than they were just hours before.

Well, there’s a lot of smiles around this center and around the country today, pretty exciting morning.

Phoenix has left Canaveral Air Force station, the next stop is Mars.

It’s pretty cool.

It doesn’t get any better than this when you’re in this business to put a spacecraft up and then wait for it to call home and have it respond the way it did, so we’re all thrilled.

That’s 295 days for our entry, descent and landing where we get to do everything that was done today but we do it in reverse.

We go from the velocity we’re in now down to 5 miles an hour in 7 minutes.

It’ll be a lot of fun.

Come see us in JPL on May 25th.

From the position I was in it was headed directly towards Mars, which is near the Pleiades.

The exhaust gases from the solid rockets were still there in a cloud and the cloud was slowly being pulled by the winds.

This cloud turned into what looked like wings and a beak and a long tail and looked amazingly just like a Phoenix bird.

And the message to me was the Phoenix bird has risen.

Like all the previous journeys into the heavens the Phoenix bird has risen, not just because of the mega team, the dedication and efforts of the folks whose hands and hearts touched the spacecraft have been essential surely but also integral are the hopes and dreams of tens of millions more.

The sentiments of President Lyndon Johnson praising the successful Mariner mission ring just as true for the Phoenix.

"In the history books of tomorrow, unlike the headlines today, the project’s name may be lost but the names of the men of vision, men of imagination and faith, who made this enterprise such a historic success, is going to be honored in the world for many generations to come."

It’s a human endeavor as much as anything.

It’s not just scientists who care about whether it’s a carbonate or a sulfate or engineers who make sure that that resistor’s adjusted just right.

It’s really about the dreams of our population.

Everybody is just waiting for the day when the announcement comes that something absolutely incredible has been found on Mars that changes our whole way of thinking.

The condition of the spacecraft is we have a very happy spacecraft.

Imagine the feeling of being in a baseball game and it’s a tie score, bottom of the ninth and you’ve got the bases full.

You could see the eyes and the expressions of all the subsystem leads looking at their screens.

And one-by-one they were picking off that they hit the sweet spot for their subsystem.

And everybody knew it was the homerun that they were looking for.

In fact it went so smoothly some people thought that they were running a simulation.

You tear up all those contingency plans, you throw em in the garbage, cause now you got a real nominal mission that’s gonna get you right to Mars on time and in the right place.

Funding for this program was provided by Desert Program Partners.