Flight of the Phoenix

The Phoenix Mars Mission blasted off on August 4 en route to a May 25, 2008, landing on the red planet. The first of NASA’s Mars Scout missions, Phoenix is led by the University of Arizona in partnership with JPL and Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which built the spacecraft. Phoenix was so named because it reuses the body of the Mars Surveyor, built for a 2001 mission that was canceled before launch. Phoenix will alight on the plains around Mars’s north polar cap. A JPL-built robot arm will sample the soil, and the water ice believed to lie just below it, to see if the site has ever had conditions favorable for microbial life. —DS