Though named appropriately after the mythical bird that is believed to be re-born from its own ashes, the Phoenix mission to the solar system's fourth planet, next to Earth, has not been wholly free of glitches. It had given some anxious moments to the scientists handling this mission a day after its landing when the "bio-barrier" designed to keep its arms germ-free on Earth did not come off fully. However, the anxiety was mercifully short-lived as the covering retracted itself, believably after being heated up by the mid-day sun the next day.
Indeed, the Phoenix is planned to perform some intricate tasks that will unravel many of the mysteries about this planet. More precisely, it will look for the existence of water in any form, which, in turn, will determine if life exists or ever existed on this planet and analyse climate and geology as has seldom been done before. To perform these tasks, vital from the astrophysics viewpoint, the spacecraft is equipped with an eight-feet-long special arm capable of digging trenches in Mars' surface in a bid to look for ice that is presumed to be buried beneath the upper soil layer, as also with analysers to examine the samples for determining organic matter or compounds that can be deemed to be the chemical building blocks of any form of life.
Significantly, the evidence collected by Phoenix is expected to be more or less conclusive though its functional life is unlikely to be long as winter is slated to set in later in the year at its parking site on Mars, curtailing sunlight, which is vitally needed to charge its solar panels. However, whatever it manages to carry out by then will be crucial, especially because a manned flight to Mars seems highly unlikely, if not wholly ruled out, primarily because of the long distance and its unbearably harsh climatic conditions.
