Mission searches for water on Mars

January 4, 1999
by Marica Dunn, The Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL - A Mars lander equipped with an arm and shovel blasted off Sunday on a quest to uncover frozen water near the planet's South Pole.

NASA's Mars Polar Lander is bound for the fringes of Mars' south polar cap, the farthest south any spacecraft has ventured on the Red Planet. It's due to arrive in December, when it's late spring and the sun never sets on Mars.

The Polar Lander's goal is to find ice in the martian soil. Where there's water, NASA's top space scientist says, there could be life.

"You've got to follow the water if you're looking for life," says Ed Weiler, head of NASA's space science division. But the Polar Lander carries no life detection equipment.

The only real way to confirm life on Mars, Weiler says, is to fetch rocks and soil. NASA plans to launch a soil-retum mission in 2005; the samples would reach Earth in 2008.

"We have a lot of reason to believe there's water on Mars in the form of ice," Weiler says. "But until you actually land there and find it and measure it, you can't say for sure. That's one thing I think this mission will demonstrate."

The Polar Lander is 31/2 feet tall and 12 feet wide. It has three legs as well as a 61/2 -foot robot arm with a scoop on the end to scrape beneath the martian surface. The collected dirt will be heated, allowing any water present to vaporize and be detected by a laser.

The Polar Lander also is equipped with a pair of probes that will peel away minutes before touchdown and slam into the martian surface at 400 mph to 500 mph, about 60 miles from the lander.

Like the lander, the twin probes also will hunt for water but at a much greater depth: They could penetrate as deep as 3 feet. The question is whether they will survive the impact and radio back data.

The probes are a high-risk experiment called Deep Space 2 that's part of NASA's New Millennium program to test new technologies for future missions.

	Why are NASA scientists saying, where there's water, there could be life? Is it possible that other liquids, besides water, also become ice? What else do scientists hope to learn from the Polar Lander probe of Mars? Try it! Collaborate with another person and determine what problems could affect the success of the Mars Polar Lander mission. Then, imagining you had unlimited resources and technology as NASA scientists, what would you do to improve similar mission in the future?

The Polar Lander is a companion to NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter launched last month. The Mars Climate Orbiter will circle the planet at about 260 miles above its poles. The two missions cost $327 million and Deep Space 2 another $29 million.

NASA has landed spacecraft on Mars only three times: the two Vikings in 1976 and Pathfinder in 1997. All three landed in the martian desert.

Weiler says Polar Lander is "landing in an area that we've never landed in before, where we think there will be some frost if not ice, in the layered terrain. Maybe a very interesting color scheme. We really don't know what we're going to see."

Scientists don't know what they're going to hear, either.

The Polar Lander is equipped with a tiny microphone. Many believe the only sounds that might be heard in the thin martian atmosphere will be the movement of the robot arm and the internal systems of the lander. There's a possibility, however slight, that the sound of dust or sand blowing against the lander also might be picked up.