Robot Is Set For a Sunday Landing on Mars
By ALICIA CHANG,
LOS ANGELES — Like a miner prospecting for gold, NASA hopes its latest robot to Mars hits pay dirt when it lands Sunday near the red planet's north pole to conduct a 90-day digging mission.
The three-legged Phoenix Mars lander fitted with a backhoe arm is zeroing in on the unexplored arctic region where a reservoir of ice is believed to lie beneath the Martian surface.
Phoenix lacks the tools to detect signs of alien life — either now or in the past. However, it will study whether the ice ever melted and look for traces of organic compounds in the permafrost to determine if life could have emerged at the site. Before this robotic geologist can excavate the soil, it must first survive a nail-biting plunge through the Martian atmosphere. Despite the rousing success of NASA's twin Mars rovers, which landed in 2004, more than half of the world's attempts to land on the planet have failed.
