A Healthy Mars Lander Gets to Work

Two days after a flawless touchdown on the surface of Mars, the Phoenix Lander is busily snapping pictures of itself and of the polar landscape. It landed in an arctic plain near the north pole called Vastitas Borealis, where it is expected to discover water ice mixed in with the frozen soil. In accordance with NASA's mandate to "follow the water," its mission is to search for evidence that liquid water may have once flowed on Mars, and to investigate whether conditions may have ever allowed for primitive biological life. Before the Phoenix's landing, NASA scientists nervously pointed out that only 55 percent of all attempts to land a vehicle on the Martian surface have been successful; they also noted the spacecraft that the Phoenix most resembles, the Mars Polar Lander, crashed in 1999. However, the Phoenix made it down with only one slight hitch.