NASA is keeping a close eye on its latest mission to Mars. The Phoenix spacecraft blasted off before dawn Saturday morning from Cape Canaveral. By Sunday morning, NASA was reporting that the Phoenix had separated from its rocket and ground controllers were busy assessing ite health.

The Phoenix Mars Mission is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in May 2008 for a close-up examination of the surface of the northern polar region.

The spacecraft has oriented itself to the sun as it was programmed to do. It will use solar panels to generate electricity during the nine-month coast to Mars. A separate set of solar arrays is attached to the lander itself.

Image above: A Delta II rocket lit up the early morning sky over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as it carried the Phoenix spacecraft on the first leg of its journey to Mars. The powerful three-stage rocket with nine solid rocket motors lifted off at 5:26 a.m. EDT. Image Credit: NASA

The Phoenix Mars lander’s assignment is to dig through the Martian soil and ice in the arctic region and use its onboard scientific instruments to analyze the samples it retrieves.

The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first of NASA’s competitively proposed and selected Mars Scout missions, supplementing the agency’s core Mars Exploration Program, whose theme is “follow the water.” The University of Arizona was selected to lead the mission in August 2003 and is the first public university to lead a Mars exploration mission.

Phoenix uses the main body of a lander originally made for a 2001 mission that was cancelled before launch. “During the past year we have run Phoenix through a rigorous testing regimen,” said Ed Sedivy, Phoenix spacecraft program manager for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, which built the spacecraft.

“The testing approach runs the spacecraft and integrated instruments through actual mission sequences, allowing us to asses the entire system through the life of the mission while here on Earth,” Sedivy added.

Samples of soil and ice collected by the lander’s robotic arm will be analyzed by instruments mounted on the deck. One key instrument will check for water and carbon-containing compounds by heating soil samples in tiny ovens and examining the vapors that are given off.

Another will test soil samples by adding water and analyzing the dissolution products. Cameras and microscopes will provide information on scales spanning 10 powers of 10, from features that could fit by the hundreds into a period at the end of a sentence to an aerial view taken during descent. A weather station will provide information about atmospheric processes in the arctic region.