Agencies
New York, May 26:
A small US spacecraft landed in the north polar region of Mars to begin a three-month search for water and building blocks of life and successfully sent images of the frozen land within two hours.
Flight controllers and NASA scientists broke into cheers as the Phoenix sent first signal to confirm its landing late last night after traversing a distance of 423 million mile over a 10-month period.
Prasun Desai, an Indian-American engineer, who put four years of work to get the solar-powered lander to the red planet, said "it felt like a really fast roller coaster."
"Everything worked out great," the engineer added.
The most difficult part, the scientists said, was to land the spacecraft since it was for the first time that the probe touched the ground on its three legs without using a cushion after it entered the Martian atmosphere at over 12,000 miles per hour.
The parachute of spacecraft opened as the atmosphere slowed it down. It shed its heat shield and fired jet thrusters to break its speed down to five miles per hour before landing.
But after "seven minutes of terror," as scientists put it, the craft performed as expected and unfurled its solar panels when the dust settled down.
A critical manoeuvre will be the first use of 7.7 foot robot arm capable of digging trenches to get samples of soil and ice into the laboratory instruments on the deck of the Phoenix. It will not be attempted for at least two days.
Phoenix was launched on August 4 last year with the mission to land for the first time in a polar region which scientists considered as the most likely to have frozen water under thin layer of soil.
The landing is a major success for NASA since more than half of all attempts by the human race to land on Martian surface have failed.
"We have passed the hardest part and are breathing again," one of the scientists said after confirmation of successful landing was received.
Phoenix uses hardware from a spacecraft built for a 2001 launch which was cancelled after loss of a similar spacecraft while landing on Mars in 1999.
The loss of Polar Lander in 1999, along with that an orbiter the same year, had forced the US space agency to overhaul its Mars exploration programme.
Phoenix, inspired by a mythical bird that is reborn from its ashes, was built by Lockheed Martin Corp and cost USD 420 million to develop and launch.
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