Gr. 7-12; 1 hour.
The Phoenix Mars Mission, the latest attempt to land on the Red Planet, is designed to study the history of water and search for complex organic molecules in the ice-rich soil of the Martian arctic. The program follows the mission's meticulous preparations and culminates with its dramatic pre-dawn launch from Cape Canaveral, FL, in August 2007. It features interviews with key scientists who speak about the spacecraft's instruments and the intricate preparations that preceded the launch. The $420 million mission is headquartered at the University of Arizona -- the first time in NASA's history that it has permitted a public university to have such off-site control of a Mars program.