This recent recipient of “Best of what’s New” by “Popular
Science” magazine, was not only an innovation to answer queries
about the red planet mars, but also a hope to many ignited minds
to find life in outer space. Phoenix did its job beautifully and
completed its programmed task before dying on Martian sands. The
only setback to this mission was that this craft could not come
back to earth with collected soil samples. This mission’s
principle investigator was Peter Smith, of the University of
Arizona with project manager Barry Goldstein at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif and development
partnership at Lockheed Mart in Space Systems, Denver with many
international contributions. This entire project was worth 520
million dollars. Launched on August 4 2007, Phoenix landed on
May 25, 2008, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land
on Martian surface. It then scoped up the soil, dug up the land,
studied its characteristics, found Martian ice (which confirmed
the previous detection by