Phoenix - End of Mission |
Phoenix - End of Mission |
Nov 10 2008, 08:05 PM
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Martian Photographer Group: Members Posts: 353 Joined: 3-March 05 Member No.: 183 |
NASA Teleconference Today about Status of Phoenix Mars Lander
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a media teleconference at 4 p.m. EST today, Monday, Nov. 10, to discuss the status of the Phoenix Mars Lander. Phoenix has been operating on the Red Planet for more than five months. Participants will be: -- Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. -- Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson -- Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio. |
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Nov 12 2008, 09:39 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 105 Joined: 13-July 05 From: The Hague, NL Member No.: 434 |
Let me be the first to say that I am eagerly awaiting the scientific results from Phoenix before forming a view about the success of Phoenix.
But in the meantime…. I am a chemical engineer (process technology) from origine and I would like to get it off my chest that if the Phoenix Mission expected to stuff a soil/ice type of sample through a narrow TEGA opening further constrained by a fine mesh, then from a simple engineering perspective that was simply completely wrong, well outside the ballpark compared to the principles applied in (process-) engineering practices. I think we should not "gift-wrap" this message somewhere in a larger evaluation, but try to examine it separately for learning & ongoing improvements. On the one hand I feel better for having gone on record with this, but overall I have a huge admiration for the team who developed the Phoenix idea and took it all the way to Mars. This is the stuff that space exploration is made off! If I may use the analogy of the oil drilling engineers (Clint Eastwood and others) coming to the assistance of a space mission in the cinema, then perhaps it is time to expand the space exploration effort and include more “ordinary” engineering inputs from outside the space centres, as missions get their hands dirty on the surface of asteroids, moons and planets... |
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