Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/nasas-phoenix-sends-intriguing-images-from-mars Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript NASA's Phoenix Mars lander touched down Sunday and began transmitting pictures from the northern arctic plains of Mars where scientists hope to find evidence of water and life-sustaining conditions. Mission co-leader Ray Arvidson explains. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. RAY SUAREZ: After traveling more than 400 million miles from Earth, yesterday NASA's mars Phoenix lander entered the red planet's atmosphere and, following a hazardous descent, softly touched down on Mars' northern polar region. NASA CONTROLLER: Touchdown signal detected. RAY SUAREZ: The safe landing was met with cheers by mission managers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.The probe immediately got to work, sending back the first-ever images of the planet's northern arctic landscape. The 900-pound solar-powered Lander will spend the next three months studying soil and ice using a robotic arm and other instruments in the hope of finding out if Mars could have supported life sometime in the past.Here to tell us more about the mission is Raymond Arvidson, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He's been involved in NASA's Mars projects since Viking in 1976 and led the science team that selected the landing site for the current Phoenix mission. And he joins us from Tucson.And, professor, what's the difference between Phoenix and the rovers that were launched earlier in the decade? How does it advance that science?RAYMOND ARVIDSON, Washington University in St. Louis: Well, the two rovers — Spirit and Opportunity — that landed in January 2004, you know, they were supposed to last 90 days. They're going on four-and-a-half years, so they're way out of warranty, but still discovering a lot.Those are equatorial-zone measurements. And the vehicles were moving, roving, and looking at the ancient rocks. And both Spirit and Opportunity have found evidence for very old rocks that formed in the presence of water. So that's very important, in terms of ancient conditions and inhabitability.Phoenix is different. Phoenix doesn't need lateral roving capability. It needs to go down maybe 50 centimeters into the soil and ice. And it has vertical mobility.We're going to a much younger terrain, and we're going to do the first actual touching and sampling of water ice and looking at the chemistry and, presumably, the information that will tell us whether or not this zone was habitable in the past, whether or not liquid water existed.