The NASA Phoenix Mars Lander is ready for liftoff from Cape Canaveral of Florida on Saturday, it was announced on Thursday.
A Delta II rocket will carry the Phoenix into Earth orbit and, about 90 minutes later, give it the push needed to send it to Mars, said officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Passadena, Los Angeles.
The lander, a robotic explorer managed JPL, is designed to explore the icy northern polar region of the Red Planet.
Project managers said the rocket will launch at either 2:26:34 a. m. or 3:02:59 a.m. local time Saturday.
"We have worked for four years to get to this point, so we are all very excited," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at JPL. "Our attention after launch will be focused on flying the spacecraft to our selected landing site, preparing for surface operations, and continuing our relentless examination and testing for the all-important descent and landing on May 25 of next year."
Phoenix will travel 422 million miles (about 675 kilometers) in an outward arc from Earth to a polar region of Mars. The mission is designed to determine if icy soil on far northern Mars has conditions that have ever been suitable for life.
Studies of potential landing sites by spacecraft orbiting Mars led NASA (National Aeronautics Space Administration) to approve a site at 68.35 degrees north latitude -- the equivalent of northern Alaska.
"Phoenix investigates the recent Odyssey discovery of near- surface ice in the northern plains on Mars," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "Our instruments are specially designed to find evidence for periodic melting of the ice and to assess whether this large region represents a habitable environment for Martian microbes."
The mission, including launch, will cost an estimated 386 million U.S. dollars.
Source: Xinhua
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