I am sure that many of you remember the Mars Rover Exploration that landed on mars in 2004. Well Guess What Nasa is planning yet another mission to mars. This mission is going to be called the Phoenix Mars Mission and the goal of this mission is to study the ice caps in the north and south poles of Mars. The Phoenix Mars lander is going to be a stationary station with a robotic arm that will move around, collect, and examin soil samples that are near the ice caps. The Phoenix Mars lander is planned on being launched in the 22 day period to which the lander has to be launch which is in August. This trip will take approximately 10 months, having the lander land on mars in the region of May of 2008. Source

Reply

I hope we get something useful out of these missions. Something which may one day enable us to inhabitate mars or atleast mine some useful minerals out of it. Otherwise these missions will be just a waste of time
 and resources.

Reply

"so while the government talks about a mission to Mars/ they leave the hood stuck in a position to starve/" thatz a quote off an Immortal Technique track maybe the government should solvin problems within our world before those beyond... jus a thought

Reply

Well said... Correct your own problems before trying to conquer others. But I don't think there is much hope here anyway.

Reply

i was watching the history channels new show called universe last night. well they said something about the pheonix mission. but they said it was set to launch summer of 2007.

do you know if this mission involves bringing back samples or not. i don't see how they would but it would be cool. that had that meteorite frome mars but that was just a small sample. if they could get a soil sample of one of the poles i am sure they would be able to determine that there is some type of life. whether it be a new form of life or some type of bacteria.

great topic!

Reply

funny i was watching that exact same show which is what enticed me to post this topic lol anyways, i doubt they would be able to bring anything back just because that would require building a shuttle there on mars to life off into space and land on earth, and right now I'm sure that we wont be doing that, so i think the probe is just going to examine the soil and ice samples the best it can and send the data back to us until maybe someday we can actually get some humans on mars to study it in person and further in depth.



So do I, with how much they cost and all!

But i think that with this mission they hope to discover new ways of condensing water, or storing water for a long time and in less space. because from what i understand from watching that TV Show on the History Chanel there is a great possibility that the Ice Caps that are on the north and south poles of Mars are just the top frozen layer of quite allot of water beneath it. They wonder how this is possible because there is no Oxygen on mars, only allot of Carbon Dioxide which is toxic and they want to know how there can be water when there is no Oxygen and Oxygen (O) is a key factor in making Water (H₂O -take not on the O lol-)

they think that there used to be an actual atmosphere on mars, and that is why the water is there so they think that the water on the surface is protecting the water below from being turned into nothing but vapors.


although i didn't pay much attention to the show, this is what i can remember to the best of my abilities, some of it may be wrong so yeah....

 

 

 

Reply

I agree, considering the raging prices of stuff. But I seriously think we should clean up our own home Earth before setting the foot on Mars just to end up destroying it to. This seems like a second chance for us, but is not a second chance yet. I mean we need to do a lot to save our Earth, Discovery Channel has already predicted that with the current rate we would be off this Earth pretty soon and if we are able to set ourselves up on some other planet or in outer space till that time then what would happen to Earth. It's nice to see the beauty, but when we'll be off the entire Earth would be burning out, just to begin again. Personally I wouldn't like to be on some ship in outer space sending off satellites over Earth to observe the atmosphere every now and then, I would love to live here itself. We need to clean up our own cribs before we set off to infiltrate new grounds.


Ditto, just what I was trying to say above.


If they are able to bring back samples, then well it'd be pretty good but I am guessing this will be an un-maned mission so I guess there'll just be robotic arms trying to understand and study the soil or whatever up there with most possible precision and then send the data back to Earth. They've already found trails of water, that means water was there on Mars once upon a time, but they aren't that sure as of yet, if that water still exists in the shape of ice caps.

I am really looking forward to this mission!

Reply

oh i know it will be an un-manned mission but i thought maybe that they will be able to launch samples back to earth.

its weird, they said that landing things on mars is so difficult that it would be like, if possible, trying to throw a football form california to new york and landing it in some type of target. so i am asuming launching something off of mars would be twice as hard with a small launcher. well maybe not, from what i have heard mars has a weak atmosphere that has been broken down by solar winds from the sun and low gravity, so it might even be the same as launching a full size rocket on earth. i don't know, i really don't know much about mars this is the first time i really got into the topic. i don't know anything about the politics at all.

Reply

Right now we could probably send in the materials needed to terraform Mars and Venus into earth-like planets(terraforming them together is only logical, as the atmosphere on Venus is too thick and the Martian atmosphere is too thin, so resources between the planets can be shared to terraform). However, the ethics of doing such things inhibit scientists from trying to do so, and we are limited by our current technology which would make such a process very time consuming and nearly impossible if equipment needs to be serviced.

Reply

ok even if we were able to do this, like you said, it is out of our technilogical hands. but not by much. the only real thing stopping us from doing this is money, politics, and religious reasons. for religious reasons someone might bring up that god entended us to liv on eart blah blah blah and so on. for money reasons nasa just doesn't have enough cash support. the us would probably end up taking it out of tax payers wallets that don't believe in the mission anyway. and as far as politics are concerned, we would need the support of other countries. this would be a world event. it would have to be. but the way things are going i don't see anything like that happening. espeacialy if the conflicts of nuclear weapons and war are at hand. i agree great idea but it is a long way away. i didn't even think about the possibilities with venus.

one question though, i might be thinking of mercury but oh well. is it venus that as a atmosphere so thick that we can't even se the surface. i mean being as it is closer to the sun than us or even mars it has a strong atmosphere. i wonder why the solar winds didn't effect it as much as mars.

Reply