Two days after a perfect landing, a radio
glitch delayed communication between a satellite orbiting Mars and the Phoenix space probe, NASA scientists said Tuesday.
But the Phoenix team will try again on Wednesday to send orders to the
probe to move its robotic arm - an act that is essential to its mission of
sampling enough of the icy terrain at Mars' north pole to see if there is life
or water on the red planet.
The ground team said Tuesday that they sent commands for the arm to move to
NASA's Mars Reconaissance Orbiter that were to be relayed to Phoenix.
But the orbiter failed to send the commands on to the lander, NASA said.
"Phoenix is healthy, everything is fine," said Fuk Li, manager of the
Mars Exploration Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL,)
according to space.com website.
A possible explanation for the problem was that the orbiter - the vital
communications link between Earth and the surface of Mars - had put its
communication relay system in a standby mode, officials said.
The satellite did however capture stunning images of the blue- coloured Phoenix
parked on Mars' rust-coloured soil and sent them back to Earth.
The ground team was also excited about a sequence of photos that showed Phoenix
as it descended on a parachute to the Mars surface on Sunday, and captured the
jettisoned heat shield that fell away on the way down.
Phoenix has already managed to send photos back to Earth of its landing area.
The images included a look at a flat valley floor, where scientists expected to
find a water-rich permafrost within reach of the robotic arm, the beginning of
a three-month research mission to sample soil and ice in the polar region.
"We can see cracks in the troughs that make us think the ice is still
modifying the surface," Peter Smith, the mission's chief scientist from
the University of Arizona, told reporters in a telecast briefing. "We see
fresh cracks. Cracks can't be old. They would fill in."
Phoenix travelled the 680 million kilometres to Mars over the past ten months. After landing, it ran on batteries until its pair of solar arrays
spread open as planned about two hours after touchdown,
dpa reported.
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