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The bright blue ellipse on this global view of Mars shows the location of the Mars Polar Lander landing site at latitude 76 degrees south, longitude 195 degrees west.
Zareh Gorjian and Eric M. De Jong of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory stitched together this mosaic of 24 images taken on a single northern summer day in April 1999. The engineers then rotated the planet to reveal the South Pole and used Viking data to fill in some of this region that is in darkness during this season. The ellipse marks an area five kilometers wide and 90 kilometers long.
(Image: JPL/NASA)
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A Reason for Thanks:
Lander To Touch Down on Mars Next Week
As millions of U.S. citizens celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend, engineers working on the Mars Polar Lander continue to keep the spacecraft on course for its scheduled landing on Mars -- Friday, December 3. The Planetary Society will also be working through the weekend to prepare for Planetfest '99, the international conference and exhibition that also begins on December 3.
Final Preparations for Landing
For the past two weeks, the Mars Polar Lander team has been testing and training for the entry, descent and landing operations of the mission.
The team has also been working to comply with the recommendations made by the Mars Climate Orbiter failure investigation board, which made some strong recommendations for guaranteeing the success of Mars Polar Lander. The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in September.
Mission planners have undertaken a number of actions to guarantee that Mars Polar Lander succeeds:
Assigned a new senior management leader Reviewed and augmented work plans Made detailed fault-tree analyses for pending mission events Held daily teleconfernces to evaluate technical progress and plan work yet to be done Planned for increased availability of the Deep Space Network for communications with the spacecraft Allowed an independent peer review panel to examine all operational and contingency procedures.
In last week's tests, mission engineers studied a detailed simulation of the landing using the spacecraft simulator at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado. Teams at JPL, Lockheed Martin Astronautics and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have also been practicing for the early surface mission.
Next Tuesday, November 30, the spacecraft will pass another hurdle when the thruster is fired again to adjust the spacecraft's flight path. Flight navigators have been using additional tracking data to help them calculate the spacecraft's path as it approaches Mars. The spacecraft remains in good health, and the team has not detected any spacecraft problems.
Exploring the South Pole
Earlier this month, NASA announced that it has named this mission's Deep Space 2 microprobes -- scheduled to smash into the surface of Mars near the planet's south pole on December 3. The probes will be called Amundsen and Scott in honor of the first explorers to reach the South Pole of Earth.
Paul Withers, a graduate student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, wrote the winning essay, among a NASA-record 17,000 entries submitted in a public contest to name the ambitious space mission.
"A century ago, Antarctica was the Earth's only unexplored continent. Then expeditions led by Amundsen and Scott landed there, striving to discover its secrets, seeking knowledge, and finding a land of stark beauty," wrote Withers, who studies the thin upper atmosphere of Mars. "Scott perished in Antarctica. His memorial's inscription reads: 'To strive, to seek, to find, not to yield.' These are aims of the Deep Space 2."
Norwegian Roald Amundsen explored the Northwest Passage before leading the first successful expedition to the South Pole, reaching it on December 14, 1911. Robert Falcon Scott led an English team to the South Pole in January 1912, only to discover the national flag left during Amundsen's earlier arrival. Although blizzards and starvation claimed Scott and his entire team on their return trip, the search party found scientifically valuable diaries and notebooks.
The main purpose of NASA's miniature probes is technical, not scientific: flight-testing advanced technology that could be used by future planetary surface microlanders. Constructed to survive an abrupt impact at 400 miles per hours with the layered terrain common in the south polar region of Mars, the two Deep Space 2 probes also carry sensors to search for the presence of water ice about three feet below the surface, as a secondary goal.
Exploring at Planetfest '99
You can get more information on Amundsen and Scott, the Mars Polar Lander, the Planetary Society's Mars Microphone, and other explorations of the universe at Planetfest '99, December 3-5, 1999 in Pasadena, California AND on the Planetfest website. Call for tickets on our toll-free number: 877-PLANETS. |
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