I think I’ve got a crush on the Phoenix Lander — I can’t stop looking at it.

The New York Times has a write up and a slide show about the upcoming 7 mintues of terror I posted about yesterday.

Some cool tid-bits from the article:

After traveling 422 million miles since its launching last Aug. 4, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming for a touchdown on Sunday

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It has been 32 years since NASA, with the twin Viking landers in 1976, has put a craft on the Martian surface using rockets to slow the descent. The last previous attempt was the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, which crashed when its engines cut off prematurely.

The later Mars Pathfinder and the two robot rovers, the Opportunity and the Spirit, which have operated for three years in the equatorial region, landed using air bags to cushion the impact. Mr. Goldstein said air bags were not practical for heavier craft like the Phoenix because the added weight of bigger bags would severely cut into the scientific payload.

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The Phoenix is named after the mythical bird that rose from its ashes, because the spacecraft is made up of parts from two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The spacecraft has the skeleton and some instruments from the 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, which remained grounded because of cost overruns, as well as instruments that are based on those aboard the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander.

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The spacecraft, sterilized to prevent contamination by Earth organisms, is to use its 7.7-foot-long robot arm like a backhoe to dig a series of trenches more than 20 inches into the surface with a movable metal scoop that has sharp prongs on the end to break and scrape expected hard surface, Dr. Smith said.

Using a camera on the end of the scoop, scientists will select samples for detailed study aboard the lander. In one experiment, samples will be dropped into a hopper to feed eight tiny one-use ovens. Each is about a half-inch long and one-eighth inch in diameter.

The sample will be slowly heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to study the transition from solid to liquid to gas, and the vapors analyzed by a mass spectrometer to measure the mass and composition of specific molecules.

This laboratory also contains two microscopes to examine the fine structure of soil and ice samples, scrutinizing features as small as one one-thousandth the width of a human hair that might be evidence of past liquid water on the planet. The Phoenix is designed to operate in the Martian summer, but scientists hope that it survives into at least mid-November. Winter brings months of darkness and no power to protect the spacecraft from a fatal deep freeze before the Sun returns, they said.

“It’s extraordinarily unlikely the vehicle will survive,” said Mr. Goldstein, the project manager. But on the outside chance that spring sunlight recharges the craft next year, he said, it has been programmed with a “Lazarus mode” to signal that it has risen from the dead.