Phoenix diary: Mission to Mars

[redtanker]

Last week, my son was part of a chaotic dress rehearsal of his primary school's production of "Fame".

This week, I heard the performance was a great success. But I missed it - I'm in Arizona as part of the first dress rehearsal of a mission to the surface of Mars.

In just over two weeks, the Phoenix mission will be launching from Florida, heading to the polar regions of Mars.

It will land there to look for the water that should be present as ice just below the surface of the bleak northern plains. I'm part of the science team that will be looking closely, very closely, at what a robot arm will dig up as it cuts through the soil and ice.

But Phoenix will not land until next May, and, meanwhile, we've got a copy of the lander to understudy the rehearsal.

We're not staring from scratch. The lander and all the instruments on board have learnt most of their lines - we've already tested that they do what we want when they're commanded directly.

But this is the first time that Phoenix and the close to one hundred members of the science team are getting together to see how this might all work on Mars.

Twenty-five-hour day

We're all sitting in the Science Operations Center in Tucson - the science team is in a maze of operations rooms, the lander behind locked doors in a hanger on the other side of the building.

Just as during real operations on Mars, we get a chance to send commands to Phoenix once every Martian morning, and at the end of its Martian work day the lander sends back its data, images and readings from all it has done during the day.

As the Martian day lasts nearly 25 hours, we'll slowly lose synch with Earth time; but for this rehearsal we're starting gently at 0800, and finish close to midnight.

Operations for a Mars mission are a race against time. We have to work during the Martian night.

There's just a little more than 12 hours to look at what has come down from the last day's operations on the Red Planet before we have to send our final script for the following day to Phoenix.

With seven instruments on board the lander, all of the science team ends up having a critical job to do.

Today we've reached Sol Two, the second day of operations of Phoenix on the surface of Mars after a successful landing.

There have been some moments of chaos, but we've got back the first images of the Martian surface to help us choose where to start digging.

It almost feels like the real thing - there's even a fly-on-the-wall film crew. A clue that this is only a dress rehearsal - a corner of a tarpaulin is poking out from underneath the foot of the Phoenix lander.