The Phoenix Mars lander and its science and operations teams at the University of Arizona and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will reach key milestones this week, including an official determination by NASA that the mission is a complete success.

Most of the Phoenix team also will shift to Earth time, instead of making the daily adjustments to local Mars time at the Phoenix arctic landing site that forces team members to work through the middle of their nights.

The team invited Aviation Week & Space Technology to "embed" here at the Phoenix Science Operations Control Center and attend most of the 14 or so daily meetings to assess the new science results being transmitted 217 million miles to Earth and plan new commands for Phoenix accordingly.

Designating the mission a success means it has completed key contractual and scientific goals with plenty of margin remaining in its systems for additional imaging, wet chemistry and microscope tests, and for the continued search for organics by its organic chemistry instrument.

In addition to searching for organics, the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) instrument developed here also has been adjusted in the hopes it can verify the earlier discovery of perchlorate salts in the soil by the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) developed by JPL (Aerospace DAILY, Aug. 11). TEGA continued to process a soil sample last week, heating it and turning up interesting results that are still being interpreted.

To complete the shift to Earth time, the team worked out a relatively simple "black and white" set of commands for Phoenix to do on Martian Sol 77 - the night of Aug. 10-11 on Earth - just after it sent down the outcome of commands uplinked for it to perform on Sol 76.

The Sol 76 data is being used to plan the science commands to be transmitted to Mars on Aug. 12 for the spacecraft to carry out Sol 78.

Among the commands sent to Phoenix to carry out Aug. 11/12 were those needed for the robotic arm to widen the Cupboard Trench along the right side of the lander, and also to deepen a trench designated "Burned Alive."

In the uplink command room, robotics engineers Matt Robinson and Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu - originally from Ghana - used 2D and 3D computer graphics to build commands for the Burned Alive trench and to use the Phoenix robotic scoop to widen the Cupboard trench in preparation for future sampling there.

Photo shows key work areas for Phoenix. TEGA Wicked Witch 'Sol' is Sol 64, cropped out of this image. Courtesy of Planetary Society, Univ. of Arizona and NASA/JPL