PASADENA — A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet’s northern polar region Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.
Cheers swept through mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another.
“In my dreams, it couldn’t have gone as perfectly as it went,” project manager Barry Goldstein said. “It went right down the middle.”
Among Phoenix’s first tasks were to check its power supply and the health of its science instruments, and unfurl its solar panels after the dust settled. Mission managers said there would be a two-hour blackout period as Phoenix conducted the checks while out of view from Earth.
Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph after a 10-month, 422 million-mile voyage through space. The lander kept in contact with Earth through the orbiting Mars Odyssey during the entire “seven minutes of terror.”
It’s the first successful soft landing on Mars since the twin Viking landers touched down in 1976. NASA’s twin rovers, which successfully landed on Mars four years ago, used a combination of parachutes and cushioned air bags to bounce to the surface.
Mission chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, had two words to describe the landing: “Picture perfect.”
Phoenix’s landing is a relief for NASA since Mars has a reputation of swallowing spacecraft. More than half of all nations’ attempts to land on Mars have failed.
Phoenix’s target landing site was 30-mile-wide shallow valley in the high northern latitudes. The site was chosen because images from space spied evidence of a reservoir of frozen water close to the surface.
Like a tourist in a foreign country, the lander initially will take in the sights during its first week on the Red Planet.