Mars Phoenix Lander

The Mars Phoenix Lander will be the next Martian probe to be land on the Red Planet.  Real soon now.  As in, on Sunday.

From the Phoenix Mars Mission homepage:

Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. But in the Martian arctic, water ice lurks just below ground level. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this circumpolar region using a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for sophisticated scientific analysis.

The complement of the Phoenix spacecraft and its scientific instruments are ideally suited to uncover clues to the geologic history and biological potential of the Martian arctic. Phoenix will be the first mission to return data from either polar region providing an important contribution to the overall Mars science strategy “Follow the Water” and will be instrumental in achieving the four science goals of NASA’s long-term Mars Exploration Program.

One of the exciting things about this mission is the Canadian involvement.  The Canadian Space Agency has contributed an important package – a weather station.

Canada’s contribution to Phoenix is a meteorological station that will record the daily weather of the Martian northern plains using temperature, wind and pressure sensors, as well as a light detection and ranging (lidar) instrument. The weather station will help improve models of the Martian climate and predict future weather processes, paving the way for future exploration missions. This information may also improve scientists’ understanding of Earth’s dynamic polar regions by comparison between the two planets. Resembling a brilliant green laser, the lidar will probe what is known as the “boundary layer” of the Martian atmosphere (the turbulent layer of the atmosphere about 7-10 km above the surface) and provide information about the structure, composition and optical properties of clouds, fog and dust in the lower atmosphere (up to 20km above the landing site).

Astronomy (to end of the year)

Here is a list of projects that I have assigned, and which I will expect to be completed before then end of June 17, the last day of CTS classes (NOT core classes, just options). If you seek that coveted “A”, then all assignments must be completed and completed well. I will accept any of these assignments (many are submittable via email) up to and including June 17.

The bottle rockets will be expected a little earlier, as we will be launching on June 10 and 12, weather permitting.

But do be aware that just because assignments have been handed in by the deadline, it doesn’t mean that they have been done well or completely. Some of these assignments require an email conversation between you and I to flesh out your responses, and to help you answer fully and completely. If the first time I hear from you about assignment 5 (Big Questions) is on the 17th, then I guarantee you will not do well on that item.

All assignments can be found on the PDQ Science page.

Here’s what I will be evaluating:

Assignment 1 – astronomy picture of the day (a WP doc attached to an email)
Assignment 2 – wikispaces registration and login (for completion)
Assignment 3 – your wiki page, with links, photos, references (if you do more than one, you need to inform me via email with the links).
Assignment 4 – What is a rocket. (a WP doc attached to an email)
Assignment 5 – big questions in astronomy (this is an email conversation answering two or three of the big questions listed)
Assignment 6 – building the bottle rocket (necessarily done in class)
Assignment 7 – calculating rocket altitude (this will be assigned presently)