Prospecting at Mars’ north pole was set back at least a day Tuesday when a communications link to NASA’s Phoenix lander, nestled into a wide, undulating expanse nicknamed Green Valley, was interrupted by what spacecraft operators called a “transient event.”
The event, caused by a cosmic ray or some other high-energy particle, knocked out the UHF radio on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of two spacecraft circling Mars that relays computer commands between Phoenix and Earth.
The interruption occurred as operators were attempting to test the nearly 8-foot-long robotic arm that is scheduled to begin digging into the Martian plain in the next few days.
Rich deposits of ice are thought to lie inches below the lander. Such deposits could provide clues to whether Mars once was, or still might be, habitable for simple life forms.
Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, emphasized that the problem does not affect the lander.
“Phoenix is healthy; everything is fine,” he said.
Li said engineers were attempting Tuesday to turn the radio back on. But even if that is unsuccessful, they could uplink the same commands to another NASA spacecraft, Mars Odyssey, which also could pass them on to Phoenix.
Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter carry similar communications equipment, but engineers prefer to restart the radio on the orbiter before switching to Odyssey because computer commands are lined up like customers at a check-out stand. Switching to the other spacecraft would mean reordering an entire set of commands, not just one.
Phoenix arrived on Mars on Sunday after a 296-day journey through space. The $420 million mission is the first to land successfully on Martian soil since the arrival of NASA’s twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in 2004.
Before the problem occurred, Phoenix’s mast camera, extending about 7 feet above the Martian surface, captured fresh images of the checkerboard landscape of ridges and troughs that is caused by the movement of the ice beneath the surface. Scientists hope to dig into one of those troughs to unravel the history of water on Mars.
Also Tuesday, NASA released pictures taken by MRO’s high-resolution camera that showed Phoenix sitting on the surface, just a few hundred feet from its parachute.
Phoenix’s mast camera also took a picture of a DVD that was attached to the science platform by the Planetary Society in Pasadena. The disc contains the names of thousands of people, as well as a library of Mars-related books.
The cover reads, “Astronauts, please take this with you.”
Made of high-quality silica glass, the disc should survive, even in Mars’ cold atmosphere, for “hundreds and hundreds of years,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the group.
“We hope the astronauts don’t take that long,” he said.
