Scientists at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility are using the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter to help choose a landing site for Phoenix. This mission, built under NASA's Mars Scout program, is due for launch in 2007.
The goal of Phoenix is to land at a high northern latitude on Mars, where water ice is suspected to lie just under a thin layer of soil. Phoenix will use its robot arm to scrape away the soil and collect a small sample of ice for analysis by its instruments.
THEMIS has provided Phoenix project scientists with daytime infrared and visible-light images of four candidate landing sites. These images can see details as small as 18 meters (59 feet) wide in the visible and 100 meters (328 feet) in the infrared.
