If you haven’t heard on the news recently, there’s a new probe that’s landing on Mars today called Phoenix.It’s landing near the north pole, with the intention of finding water ice or carbon dioxide ice in the soil, amongst many other things. You can read about these details on the website, since I don’t know them very well to recount.
The part of this that’s interesting to me is that Phoenix has no antennas or transmitters capable of relaying data back to (or from) Earth. The mission relies entirely on relaying data through two Mars satellites, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Odyssey probe. All the data from the probe must go through one of these satellites, which have larger antennas and more powerful transmitters than Phoenix.
But there is a third option. Nasa could just point the largest steerable radio telescope at Mars and try to listen in on Phoenix directly. And that’s what they’ll be doing in Green Bank this evening. The GBT will be tracking the decent of the probe to the surface, and should be able to track the doppler shift as the probe decelerates. They won’t be able to decode any data, since the signal will be too weak, but they will still get the first indication that the probe has landed on the surface and is transmitting to the orbiters.
So my plan for the night is to hopefully watch this from the GBT control room. Unfortunately I won’t have easy access to a computer to relay details immediately, but I will try to get some pictures and hopefully have something interesting to relate about the event afterwards. We’ll see how it all goes. Entry starts at 7:38pm EDT (Today!), so be watching NASA TV.
—cts