 "Photo: NASA")
Several Washington University students and faculty spent their summer in Tucson, Ariz., gathering data from the NASA Phoenix Lander.
In the past several weeks, much of the team has left Tucson. Raymond Arvidson, chair of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, is one of the three scientists who leads the mission.
According to Arvidson, his involvement in the mission has not changed, except that he now works from St. Louis. Each sol, the term used to refer to a day on Mars, is led by one of the science leads. Each sol has a plan that is transmitted to the lander.
Currently, the team is assembling the mission archives, which will be available to the public in January. According to Arvidson, the University is the lead institution for archiving the data.
Sophomore Kirsten Siebach is one of five students from the University who was in Tucson over the summer. Siebach and the other students’ continuing roles involve archiving the data collected by the lander, as the spacecraft itself has very limited memory capacity.
Siebach said the biggest difference is that the students have different schedules than they did during the summer. According to Siebach, while in Tucson, one student could work for an entire day shift, but now that classes are in session, the students have to coordinate their schedules and sometimes have to switch during the day.
“Now that we’re out of Tucson, we all have different things to do with our lives,” Siebach said.
During their time in Tucson, those involved with the mission adjusted their schedules to the length of a sol, which is approximately 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
“Not working on Mars time means we [don’t] get as much communication with the spacecraft. We have to plan two days in advance,” Siebach said. “We have to keep an eye on our instruments, because if something goes wrong, you won’t find out for two days and things won’t get done.”
Siebach says that since the lander is located above the Arctic Circle, the landing site will soon be covered in ice and the lander will start to lose its functions that require more power.
According to Siebach, the mission plan is important because, as the year continues, the landing site will get less sunlight as the sun stays closer to the horizon and the lander will only be able to function for a limited time.
“The whole site will be covered in ice and the lander will die. It’s like we’ve landed in northern Canada,” she said. “By November, there won’t be enough power to use the robotic arm and the analytical instruments, so the vehicle will become a weather station,” Arvidson said.
Arvidson says that through the end of December, the team will be able to observe weather phenomena, and by that time, so little sunlight will reach the lander that he is uncertain that it will be able to function at all.
“At some point the sun is going to be so low that [the lander] is just not going to wake up when it’s [signaled] by one of the orbiters,” Arvidson said.
The team has been able to see frost from water ice on the lander early in the morning and is involved in analyzing the data from the three orbiters above the planet.
The orbiters have observed craters that have snow and ice throughout the summer, since the bowl shape of the crater allows the ice to escape the sunlight. At the landing site, water ice is only present a few centimeters below the surface.
“The whole program for Mars exploration is ‘follow the water.’ Water and life kind of go together. Follow the water and understand the environment of today and in the past and whether this was a habitable site. That’s a big jump,” Arvidson said.
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