NASA's Phoenix Lander Might Peek Under a Rock
TUCSON, Ariz. -- If the robotic arm on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander
can nudge a rock aside today, scientists on the Phoenix team would
like to see what's underneath.
Engineers who develop commands for the robotic arm have prepared
a plan to try displacing a rock on the north side of the lander.
This rock, roughly the size and shape of a VHS videotape, is informally
"We don't know whether we can do this until we try," said Ashitey
Trebi Ollennu, a robotics engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. "The idea is to move the rock with minimum disturbance
to the surface beneath it. You have to get under it enough to lift it
as you push it and it doesn't just slip off the scoop."
The lander receives commands for the whole day in the morning, so there's
no way to adjust in mid-move if the rock starts slipping. Phoenix took
stereo-pair images of Headless to provide a detailed three-dimensional
map of it for planning the arm's motions. On Saturday, Sept. 20, the arm
enlarged a trench close to Headless. Commands sent to Phoenix Sunday evening,
Sept. 21, included a sequence of arm motions for today, intended to slide
the rock into the trench.
Moving rocks is not among the many tasks Phoenix's robotic arm was designed
to do. If the technique works, the move would expose enough area for digging
into the soil that had been beneath Headless.
"The appeal of studying what's underneath is so strong we have to give this
a try," said Michael Mellon, a Phoenix science team member at the University
of Colorado, Boulder.
The scientific motive is related to a hard, icy layer found beneath the
surface in trenches that the robotic arm has dug near the lander. Excavating
down to that hard layer underneath a rock might provide clues about processes
affecting the ice.
"The rocks are darker than the material around them, and they hold heat," Mellon
said. "In theory, the ice table should deflect downward under each rock. If we
checked and saw this deflection, that would be evidence the ice is probably
in equilibrium with the water vapor in the atmosphere."
An alternative possibility, if the icy layer were found closer to the surface
under a rock, could be the rock collecting moisture from the atmosphere, with
the moisture becoming part of the icy layer.
The Phoenix mission is led by Smith at the University of Arizona with project
management at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and
development partnership at Lockheed Martin in Denver. International contributions
come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland;
the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute
in Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
For more about Phoenix, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix
Media contacts: Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson