Morten Bo Madsen spends his work day crunching data on a laptop seated in front of a clear plastic-covered box about the size of a widescreen computer monitor that emits a startlingly bright blue light. No, this isn't a scene from a sci-fi movie. Madsen is one of the 150 scientists and engineers working on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The bright light keeps Madsen's internal clock in check, because Madsen, you see, is living on Mars time. Phoenix is a $420 million mission with the aim of sampling and analyzing the dirt and subsurface ice layer in the north polar regions of Mars as it looks for signs that the red planet may have been habitable at some point in the past. Since the spacecraft landed on Mars on May 25, mission controllers have been living on its schedule, or rather the exact opposite of it. When the spacecraft is sleeping during the Martian night, the scientists are up analyzing data; when the spacecraft rises at the beginning of the day on Mars, they retire and let Phoenix do its work.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander pulled an all-nighter for the first time Monday. Mission controllers extended the spacecraft's schedule to keep it awake during the Martian night so the lander could coordinate with observations made by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) as it flew over Phoenix. Phoenix is using its weather station (which measures temperature, wind speed and wind direction), stereo camera and fork-like thermal and conductivity probe to monitor changes in the lower atmosphere and at the surface of Mars as MRO monitors the atmosphere and ground from above.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander used its robotic arm to expose more of the hard icy layer just below the Martian surface so that it can more easily gather a sample of the material for analysis. The trench, informally called "Snow White," was about 8 by 12 inches (20 by 30 centimeters) after digging by the arm Saturday. Mission controllers sent commands to the spacecraft Monday to further extend the length of the trench by about 6 inches (15 centimeters). Scientists said tests in a lab on Earth suggested more area must be exposed in order to collect a proper sample.

"Flabbergasted" NASA scientists said on Thursday that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it. Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander's instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft's robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected. "We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past present or future," Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists.

Scientists believe NASA's Phoenix Mars lander exposed bits of ice while recently digging a trench in the soil of the Martian arctic, the mission's principal investigator said Thursday. Crumbs of bright material initially photographed in the trench later vanished, meaning they must have been frozen water that vaporized after being exposed, Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice," Smith said.

Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That's the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable. Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt. Phoenix merged two previously dug trenches over the weekend into a single pit measuring a little over a foot long and 3 inches deep. The new trench was excavated at the edge of a polygon-shaped pattern in the ground that may have been formed by the seasonal melting of underground ice.

The Phoenix Mars lander's organic chemistry instrument is about half way through its first multi-day/multi-temperature heating cycle in a search for water ice and organics on the Martian surface. At the same time, the lander's robotic arm is beginning to dig deeper at one location to the left front of the vehicle, while also reaching further right to start a new trench in more pillow-like material. The pillow-like soil is at the center of a soil polygon at the landing site, while the deepening trench is in a liner depression. The Alliance Spacesystems (ASI) arm has been working perfectly and is easier to target than the much smaller ASI arms on the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, says Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He is a lead science investigator on both the Phoenix and rover programs.

Scientists ran into a snag when trying to deliver a sample of Martian arctic soil to one of the instruments on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, mission controllers said on Saturday. The lander's robotic arm released a handful of clumpy Martian soil onto a screened opening of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) on Friday, but the instrument did not confirm that any of the sample passed through the screen. Images taken on Friday show soil resting on the screen over an open sample-delivery door of TEGA, which is designed to heat up soil samples and analyze the vapors they give off to determine the soil's composition. The researchers have not yet determined why none of the sample appears to have gotten past the screen, but they have begun proposing possibilities. "I think it's the cloddiness of the soil and not having enough fine granular material," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, the digging czar for the $420 million Phoenix mission.

Sharp new images received Saturday from the Phoenix lander largely convinced scientists that the spacecraft's thrusters had uncovered a large patch of ice just below the Martian surface, team members said. That bodes well for the mission's main goal of digging for ice that can be tested for evidence of organic compounds that are the chemical building blocks of life. Team members said Friday that photos showing the ground beneath the lander suggested that the vehicle was resting on splotches of ice. Washington University scientist Ray Arvidson said the spacecraft's thrusters may have blown away dirt covering the ice when the robot landed one week ago.

After successfully marking a series of "firsts" for NASA, the Phoenix Mars Lander suffered radio problems, delaying the start of its main task: digging into frozen soil. NASA said the radio problems were short-lived and the UHF radio system has been restored.

NASA has cleared up a malfunction that for several hours caused a rupture in communications between Phoenix Mars Lander, the US space agency said Wednesday. NASA said a "transient event" had knocked out UHF radio transmissions between Phoenix and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which relays data and instructions between the Phoenix and Earth.

A spacecraft orbiting Mars has photographed the Phoenix Mars Lander on the surface of the red planet, NASA scientists announced today. Mission controllers also said the mission seems to have hit its first snag as the radio on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which communicates with Phoenix, has shut itself off due to an unknown problem. Despite this setback, Phoenix seems to be doing just fine.

A telescopic camera in orbit around Mars caught a view of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute during the lander's successful arrival at Mars Sunday evening, May 25. The image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter marks the first time ever one spacecraft has photographed another one in the act of landing on Mars.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has apparently survived the fiery plunge through the Martian atmosphere and landed on the red planet's arctic plains, with mission scientists eagerly awaiting word on the health of the spacecraft. "Phoenix has landed! Phoenix has landed!" shouted a NASA commentator. "Welcome to the northern plains of Mars!"

A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life. Cheers swept through mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another

NASA has successfully landed five robots on Mars over the past three decades. Its latest spacecraft, Phoenix Mars, will touch down in the Martian arctic region on Sunday. Here's why NASA is going again.

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander survived its fiery plunge through the Red Planet's atmosphere in Sunday and made a bull’s-eye touchdown near its north pole. The robotic craft, designed to dig into the icy soil to determine if the permafrost could have supported primitive life, landed as planned at 7:38 p.m. ET Sunday under a sunny Martian sky. It took another 15 minutes for the radio signals confirming the safe landing to travel the 170 million miles (270 million kilometers) from Mars to Earth.

NASA's Mars-bound Phoenix spacecraft is gearing up for a landmark landing near the martian north pole this month to find out whether the region could have once supported microbial life. Phoenix is on course for a planned May 25 touchdown in the martian arctic that, if successful, will mark the first powered landing on Mars since NASA's hefty Viking 2 lander set down in 1976. But first, the probe is expected to fire its thrusters several times in the next few weeks to fine-tune its flight path. "It's scary how smooth it's been," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "The vehicle has just been behaving beautifully."

NASA's next spacecraft to visit Mars has changed course to zero in on its red planet landing site. The Phoenix Mars Lander fired its thrusters for 35 seconds Thursday to fine-tune its heading for a planned May 25 landing near the Martian north pole. "This is our first trajectory maneuver targeting a specific location in the northern polar region of Mars," said Brian Portock, chief of NASA's Phoenix navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. Phoenix's targeted drop zone is an area that mission scientists have dubbed "Green Valley." The region is a broad, flat valley where mission planners plan to land Phoenix somewhere within a 62-mile by 12-mile (100-km by 20-km) ellipse.

Several crucial devices aboard NASA's Mars-bound Phoenix lander have passed in-flight testing. Mission managers remotely inspected Phoenix's descent-monitoring radar as well as its UHF radio, which will communicate with Mars satellites after it reaches the red planet's surface on May 25, 2008. The instruments passed all tests with flying colors as the craft zooms through space at 76,000 mph (34 kilometers per second). "Everything is going as planned. No surprises, but this is one of those times when boring is good," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander lit up the predawn Florida sky Saturday, launching spaceward on a mission to determine whether the planet could have once supported primitive life. A United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket launched Phoenix towards Mars at 5:26:34 a.m. EDT (0926:34 GMT) from Pad 17A at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The three-stage booster is bound for the flat northern plains of Vastitas Borealis near the martian north pole, where it is expected to dig into and sample the region's icy soil with its eight-foot (2.4-meter) robotic arm. "It's a wonderful morning to go to Mars," NASA's Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein, of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), just before liftoff. As predicted, weather conditions were pristine for the early morning space shot. The launch was delayed 24 hours earlier this week due to bad weather during rocket fueling. Just after the supersonic crackle of the launch, Phoenix officials let out gasps of excitement as the rocket careened toward Mars.

At the Phoenix prelaunch news conference, NASA's Launch Director Chuck Dovale said the launch team is ready to go for Saturday's early morning liftoff. Weather Officer Joel Tumbiolo reports favorable conditions for launch time, with only a 20 percent chance of weather preventing liftoff. The forecast calls for scattered clouds, light ground and upper-level winds, and good visibility. The launch preparations got back on track after a one-day delay because of severe weather in the vicinity of the launch pad on Tuesday that prevented the Delta II launch team from completing the fueling of the rocket's second stage. The Phoenix Mars lander's assignment is to dig through the Martian soil and ice in the arctic region and use its onboard scientific instruments to analyze the samples it retrieves.

Only a few days remain to fly your name - or those of family members and friends - to Mars. This summer, The Planetary Society will send a DVD containing the names of individuals from around the world to Mars aboard NASA's first Scout mission, Phoenix. Once a name is entered on The Planetary Society website, a certificate can be downloaded, stating the name's inclusion on the archival message from Earth to Mars. So far, about 200,000 people from more than 70 countries have signed up to send their names. The deadline for submitting names has just been extended to February 12, 2007 at Noon, Pacific time. People everywhere are encouraged to submit names to fly to Mars, including those of children and grandchildren, classmates, or even a favorite family pet. The disk will also include "Visions of Mars," a collection of 19th and 20th century stories and art by some of Earth's visionaries.

Scientists are scrambling to find an alternative landing site for a long-armed robot set to launch this summer on a mission to dig into Mars' icy north pole to search for signs of primitive life. The original landing spot was nixed after images beamed back by the eagle-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter unexpectedly showed scores of bus-sized boulders littered over old crater rims on flat plains. The gigantic rocks pose a danger to NASA's Phoenix Mars lander, which unlike the rolling twin rovers, will be stationary, mission principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona said during a news teleconference Thursday.

NASA engineer Barry Goldstein said he's "scared to death" about the Colorado-built Phoenix Mars Lander, and everybody else on the mission should be, too. "You've got to be constantly scared to death and have the perspective that there are flaws in the system," Goldstein said Thursday, while standing alongside the solar-powered Phoenix lander in a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems southwest of Denver in Jefferson County. "That doesn't mean that there are flaws, but you have to constantly be hunting to find them if they are there," said Goldstein, NASA's Phoenix project manager.

NASA’s next mission to Mars—the Phoenix lander—is undergoing readiness testing in preparation for an early August launch window. For the first time since NASA’s Viking missions in the 1970’s, the plan calls for Phoenix to safely settle down on Mars using a set of onboard rocket thrusters—no airbags this time as successfully used by NASA’s last three red planet landings. When Phoenix touches down within the northern polar plains of Mars, it will be ready for research duties. This stationary probe is armed with a robotic scoop to dig and scratch into the martian surface for answers regarding the history of water on Mars and the planet’s potential as an extraterrestrial address for life.

NASA's next mission to the red planet—the Phoenix Mars Lander—is a true wedding of technology with planetary exploration: Something old, something new…something borrowed and something blue. Named after the resilient mythological bird, Phoenix is based upon a lander that was meant to fly in 2001, but administratively mothballed by NASA. It is also outfitted with instruments that are improved variations of gear carried onboard the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander. That vehicle went astray on touchdown nearly seven years ago, a breakdown of managerial and engineering matters—sadly setting off blues for a red planet. Today, the flight of the Phoenix is a different story.

NASA's next mission to the Red Planet, the Phoenix Mars Lander, is coming together in preparation for its August 2007 launch. Engineers are now incorporating many of its subsystems, including the flight computer, power systems and science instruments. If all goes well, the spacecraft will land near Mars' north polar ice cap, and analyze samples that it scoops up from the icy soil.

The next Mars lander is undergoing assembly and testing, being readied for departure next year to explore the martian arctic. This probe is equipped to dig deep, quite literally, into an ongoing mystery—the history of water on Mars and the planet’s potential as an extraterrestrial address for life. NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission is the first in the space agency’s Scout series, a class of spacecraft designed to be inventive but relatively low-cost in furthering Mars exploration.

Canadian innovation will be the main scout in NASA's next lander mission to Mars. A Canadian-designed weather station will play a lead role in answering questions about the planet's geology and climate. "We are now just learning that those environments, to our great surprise, do support microbes," said Victoria Hipkin, a planetary scientist at the Canadian Space Agency.

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander on to the icy ground of the far-northern Martian plains. NASA's Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water ice, and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present. Today's announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major milestone followed a critical review of the project's planning progress and preliminary design, since its selection in 2003.

If all goes right, in June 2008, a small piece of the Palouse will be stabbing into the northern polar ice cap of Mars. Pullman-based Decagon Devices Inc., founded in 1983 by former WSU soil scientist Gaylon Campbell, has 44 employees researching, creating and marketing products that have applications in foods, pharmaceuticals, biology, forestry, soil sciences, and now, researching Mars. The Phoenix Lander is planned to land May 2008 in the northern polar region of Mars, and expose the upper few feet of surface material using a robotic arm to find the ice discovered by the Odyssey mission in 2002.

On May 25th, 2008, the world may finally know if life exists on other planets. Or at least that's the hope of the scientists behind NASA's Phoenix, the first Mars Scout Mission scheduled to launch in August of 2007. Rising out of the design and discovery of previous Mars missions, the Phoenix will travel to the lower latitudes of Mars to analyze the abundant and accessible ice discovered in 2002 by the Gamma Ray Spectrometer. "Water is the building block of life," says Project Manager Barry Goldstein. "On Earth, life is everywhere. Our hope is that we will discover some of the building blocks of life in the ice on Mars."

As a flotilla of Mars-bound probes nears their target, scientists and engineers have begun work on the Mars Phoenix lander, the flagship spacecraft for NASA's Scout line of innovative and econo-class Red Planet explorers.

NASA selected today a new lander mission to explore the high northern latitudes of Mars. That zone is thought be the site of a rich reservoir of sub-surface ice. Under the space agency's Mars Scout program, the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory will build Phoenix. The craft is set to haul a set of built but never flown instruments designed for a cancelled 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander.

NASA today selected Phoenix, an innovative and relatively low-cost mission, to study the red planet, as the first Mars Scout mission. The Phoenix lander mission is scheduled for launch in 2007. The 2007 Scout mission joins a growing list of spacecraft aimed at exploring Mars. It also represents NASA's first fully competed opportunity for a dedicated science-driven mission.

Tucson soon will be base for an exciting, historic lander mission to Mars. NASA today selected the University of Arizona "Phoenix" mission as the first Scout mission in its Mars Exploration Program. It will be launched in 2007. Phoenix will land at Mars’ icy north polar region, dig with a robotic arm into arctic terrain for clues on the history of water, and search for environment suitable for microbes.

A space scientist at The University of Texas at Dallas is a member of a team selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to undertake the first of the space agency's "scout" missions to Mars, scheduled for launch in 2007 and arrival one year later.

NASA announced today that Phoenix, a mission proposed by the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, will be the first Scout mission to Mars. Phoenix is a robotic lander designed to search for signs of water on the Red Planet. The spacecraft, which will launch for Mars in 2007, beat out three other proposed missions in NASA's Scout competition.

Arizona State University and University of Arizona space scientists are about to go into orbit with anxiety waiting for a decision from NASA on who will get a $350 million space project. Announcement of the winner will come today or Monday, officials at both schools said.

BREAKIRON Animation&Design today announced its role in depicting the Arizona State University (ASU) proposal for NASA's 2007 Scout mission space project. ASU is currently one of four finalists in mission design for NASA's Mars Exploration Program.

In June 2008, a lander mission called Phoenix could deliver tools to search for habitable zones and the history of water on Mars. NASA today announced that the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory's Phoenix mission has been selected as one of four candidates to fly NASA's first Mars Scout Mission, cost-capped at $325 million, planned for launch in 2007. Peter H. Smith of the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory heads the Phoenix mission.

Hardware left over from NASA’s canceled Mars 2001 lander mission may yet find its way to the surface of the red planet under the agency’s Mars Scouts program, a series of missions proposed for launch starting in 2007. NASA is making hardware from the Mars 2001 lander and other programs available free of charge to investigators proposing missions under the Mars Scouts program, said Steve Matousek, deputy manager for solar system exploration in the Advanced Studies office of the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.