NASA Probe Lands on Mars to Search for Signs of Life - Bloomberg.com News
NASA Probe Lands on Mars to Search for Signs of Life (Update3)
By Demian McLean.
May 26 (Bloomberg) — NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander touched down safely today on the Red Planet, where the probe will sift through the icy soil for any signs that it once harbored life.
“We’ve passed the hardest part and we’re breathing again,” Mars Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein said, according to NASA. The Red Planet’s rocky terrain and equipment problems have led to the failure of more than half of all Mars missions, including a Phoenix predecessor destroyed in 1999.
Phoenix sent a signal confirming it landed safely in the northern polar region of Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on its Web site. The message took 15 minutes to travel to Earth from Mars at the speed of light.
The probe is part of NASA’s current theme in Mars exploration: follow the water. Ice is plentiful beneath the red soil and the space agency wants to know whether liquids also exist underground. “Where there tends to be water on Earth, there tends to be life,” Lynn Craig of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in an interview. “So it’s potentially a place where life could have existed.”
