The Phoenix lander will look for microbial environments in the Martian arctic.
Yesterday, the Phoenix, a robotic lander mission to the Martian arctic region, launched successfully. The lander is scheduled to reach Mars in May of 2008.
When deployed, the lander will probe the arctic looking for enviroments that might be suitable for microbes. The lander was re-engineered from parts of a previously canceled Mars mission from 2001. Still, the price tag was $325 million for the spacecraft - cheaper than many previous missions. NASA has replaced expensive missions with "cheaper, better, faster" Scout missions. The project was multinational, but headed up by the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Sciences Laboratory in Tuscon Arizona.
Included on the lander is a DVD produced by the Planetary Society, containing multimedia files about Mars (like Orson Welles' panic inducing radio broadcast of 'War of the Worlds') and names of Mars supporters gathered from the internet. The DVD is made out of silica to withstand Martian weather for thousands of years and is intended to be a historical artifact of interest to any future human colonizers (if/when we get there, I bet we will no longer have the right codecs or equipment to play it).
