Mission controllers for NASA’s Phoenix lander have decided to practice digging holes on Mars for an extra day instead of moving on to collect the soil for analysis.

Phoenix began digging into the soil over the weekend and was due to start collecting soil samples for study on Wednesday.

But now mission leaders have decided to postpone the schedule by a day, performing another test scoop on Wednesday and delivering its first shovelful of Martian dirt to the [ Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer ] (TEGA) on Thursday.

TEGA is responsible for determining the composition of the Martian soil. It has eight slots for samples, each one precious because it can only be used once.

Chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson said

“When we deliver our first sample to TEGA, we want to be absolutely sure that we have what we want and deliver it properly”

Smith likened the process of commanding the lander from 275 million kilometers away to teaching someone how to tie their shoes over the telephone.

“It’s really tricky because you have to give them all the steps and you can’t quite tell what they’re doing,” he said. “We tell the arm what it needs to think about and where the surface is and what motor motion it has to do to get there, but it’s only six or eight hours later that we see what it’s done.”

The key communication link with NASA’s Phoenix lander has been restored, after an outage delayed the mission’s progress by one day.

Phoenix does not communicate directly with Earth, but are relayed between Phoenix and Earth by two NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

The problem occurred when NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) UHF radio failed to relay a sequence of commands from Earth, intended to guide Phoenix through the second day of its mission.

Because Phoenix did not receive any fresh instructions, it performed what is known as a “run-out sequence”, which amounts to a continuation of the previous day’s activities.

On Tuesday evening, MRO’s UHF radio started working again and successfully relayed images and other data from Phoenix back to Earth. MRO’s radio apparently went into a standby mode, for a still unknown reason.

Mars lander Phoenix enters the martian orbit this afternoon, and there are several places you can watch the event “live”. I put live in quotes since there is a 15 minute delay between when it happens and when we see it, due to the distance that it has to travel to get back to us.

The landing is being referred to by NASA as “7 minutes of terror”, and there is good reason for this. The Phoenix will enter the atmosphere traveling between 12,000 and 13,000 mph, and will slow to just 5 miles per hour by the time it reaches the surface.

Of the last thirteen attempt to land on the surface, only five have been successful, so while they are hopefully optimistic, they are working against the odds on this one.

If you want to watch, you can do so here :

[ CNN with Miles O’Brien ] will stream the landing live on the internet at this link.
[ NASA TV ] will have coverage both on the web and on TV
[ National Radio Astronomy Observatory ] will also have it available.