<img title="Image: http://www.myvivvo.com/thumbnail.php?file=art.mars.surface.nasa_351504358.jpg&amp;size=article_medium" src="http://www.myvivvo.com/thumbnail.php?file=art.mars.surface.nasa_351504358.jpg&amp;size=article_medium" alt="Probe lands on Mars NASA says">
										
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								<span>The first pictures from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which 
successfully touched down near Mars' north pole Sunday, showed a pattern
 of brown polygons as far as the camera could see.<br><br>"It's 
surprisingly close to what we expected and that's what surprises me 
most," said Peter Smith, the mission's principal investigator. "I 
expected a bigger surprise."<br><br>The landing on the Red Planet's 
arctic plains -- which ended a 296-day journey -- was right on target, a
 feat NASA's Ed Weiler compared to landing a hole-in-one with a golf 
ball from 10,000 miles.<br><br>The landing -- dubbed the "seven minutes 
of terror" -- was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who 
have witnessed the failure of similar missions.<br><br>In mission 
control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, 
they celebrated the lander's much-anticipated entry.<br><br>"It was better than we could have imagined," Barry Goldstein, project manager for the Phoenix mission, told CNN.<br><br>The Phoenix's 90-day mission is to analyze the soils and permafrost of Mars' arctic tundra for signs of past or present life.<br><br>The
 lander is equipped with a robotic arm capable of scooping up ice and 
dirt to look for organic evidence that life once existed there, or even 
exists now.<br><br>"We are not going to be able to answer the final 
question of is there life on Mars," said principal investigator Peter 
Smith, an optical scientist with the University of Arizona. "We will 
take the next important step. We'll find out if there's organic material
 associated with this ice in the polar regions. Ice is a preserver, and 
if there ever were organics on Mars and they got into that ice, they 
will still be there today."<br><br>The twin to the Mars Polar Lander 
spacecraft, Phoenix was supposed to travel to Mars in 2001 as the Mars 
Surveyor spacecraft. They were originally part of the "better, faster, 
cheaper" program, formulated by then-NASA Administrator Dan Goldin to 
beef up planetary exploration on a lean budget.<br><br>But Polar 
malfunctioned during its descent into Mars' atmosphere in 1999 and 
crashed. An investigation concluded that as many as a dozen design flaws
 or malfunctions doomed the spacecraft.<br><br>The failure of that 
mission, as well as another spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter 
the same year, led to NASA to put future missions on hold and rethink 
the "better, faster, cheaper" approach. Mars Surveyor went to the 
warehouse.<br><br>But all was not lost. In 2003, Smith proposed a plan 
to re-engineer the Mars Surveyor and fly it on a mission to look for 
signatures of life in the ice and dirt of Mars far North. Mars Phoenix, 
literally and figuratively, rose from the ashes of Surveyor.<br><br>Engineers
 set to work, testing and retesting the onboard system to ferret out and
 fix all the flaws they could find. iReport.com: Send your photos, video
 of space.<br><br>"We always have to be scared to death," Goldstein 
said. "The minute we lose fear is the minute that we stop looking for 
the next problem."<br><br>The team was concerned about the Phoenix 
landing system. NASA had not successfully landed a probe on Mars using 
landing legs and stabilizing thrusters since the Viking missions in the 
late 1970s. The other three successful Mars landings -- Pathfinder in 
1997 and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004 -- used massive 
airbags that inflated around the landing craft just before landing to 
cushion the impact.<br><br>The Phoenix doesn't have airbags because the lander is too big and heavy for them to work properly.<br><br>Its
 landing site was targeted for the far northern plains of Mars, near the
 northern polar ice cap. Data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft indicate 
large quantities of ice there, likely in the form of permafrost, either 
on the surface or just barely underground.<br><br>"Follow the water" has become the unifying theme of NASA's Mars exploration strategy.<br><br>In
 2004, the rover Opportunity found evidence that a salty sea once lapped
 the shores of an area near Mars' equator called Meridiani Planum. 
Astrobiologists generally agree that it's best to look for life in wet 
places.</span>
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