Balanced News Blog

Aidan Jones
The Guardian

Nasa’s Phoenix Mars lander touched down on the Red Planet early this morning, in a mission that may yield evidence of primitive life amid the permafrost.

Mission controllers faced a tense wait as the £212m probe plummeted through the thin Martian atmosphere and used a heat shield, parachutes and jet thrusters to slow its descent from an entry speed of 13,000mph to just 5mph on landing, in what was dubbed “seven minutes of terror”.

The craft, the first mission to Mars for four years, touched down at 12.53am, ending a 420m-mile, 10-month journey since it was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The touchdown, the first soft landing by a spacecraft on legs on Mars for more than 30 years, was greeted with shouts and applause back at mission control.

Speaking ahead of the landing, Peter Smith, the mission’s lead investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson said:

“If we get the signal all the way to the surface we’ll be very happy and there’s going to be tremendous cheers.”

Using a robotic arm, the rover will pierce the topsoil of the Martian northern polar region, and for the first time take ice and mineral samples from beneath the surface to see if the planet could sustain life.

Water is known to exist on Mars as vapour in the atmosphere and as ice below the surface, but there is currently no water on the planet’s surface. However previous Nasa explorations have revealed canyons and shallow lakes, suggesting water flowed billions of years ago.

Scientists believe that bacterial spores could lie dormant in cold, dry and airless conditions for millions of years, potentially reactivating when conditions change.