MONTREAL - Canada, which is part of a group working to bring samples of Mars back to Earth, has helped the mission exploring the Red Planet to get more bang for its buck, says a key American scientist.
Peter Smith, the lead scientist behind the Phoenix Mars Lander, describes the Canadian contribution to the mission as "a godsend," and says a $37-million Canadian-built weather station on board the spacecraft has worked "flawlessly" since it landed on May 25.
"Because we're a low-cost mission, having Canada supply our weather station allowed us to do a lot more than we could have done with the dollars provided," he told The Canadian Press.
The word "Canada" capped with a small Maple Leaf flag is branded on a thermal blanket wrapped around the station, which is the size of a big shoe box.
"We have pressure and temperature readings essentially every (Martian) day of 24 hours, 48 minutes," Smith said.
A specially developed Canadian instrument known as a lidar is also being used to take measurements of dust distribution as high as 15 kilometres above the surface of the planet.
"The Canadian contribution is helping (us) understand the interaction between water in the atmosphere and water under the surface," Smith said in a wide-ranging interview.
The current mission is part of a long-term program which will eventually lead to bringing Martian samples back to Earth.
"That's one of the big exciting things coming up in the Mars future and that will probably be 10 or 15 years from now," Smith said.
But he also noted that it will be an extremely expensive mission with its own challenge.
"To spend $6 billion or whatever it's going to be, you want to make sure you've got the right sample."
The Canadian Space Agency is part of an international working group that's already working on the mission to bring the samples back from Mars. While the details are still being discussed, the agency says it's too early to say what commitments will be made by Canada.
There has also been talk about a possible manned Mars mission in 2030 at the earliest, but Smith said that timetable is "really optimistic."
"Sending humans to Mars is a very difficult undertaking and while technically I think we could do it, I'm not sure we have either the political will or the desire yet to do it," he added.
For now, the 60-year-old scientist and his team are concentrating on the work being done by the scoop on the Mars lander which has been digging for water.
"Frankly, it's just the ingredients of life we're looking for, not life itself."
Smith said scientists have already been surprised by what they have found.
"We dug two trenches and the ice layer we found in the first trench we dug was white and looks almost like snow and the second one is dark," he said.
"Six feet apart and you have two kinds of ice."
A special rasp was added to the back of the scoop after studies were done at the Space Instrumentation Laboratory at York University.
York's Peter Taylor says the original plan of the Phoenix science team was to scrape the ice with a fork to collect ice samples.
"At York we were cautious about this and convinced the science team that the ice samples would simply vaporize away before they could be analyzed," he said.
"Adding the rasp to collect samples faster will hopefully ensure that ice can be delivered to an analyzer before it disappears."
Smith also said he expects the mission, which originally had "a three-month warranty" to last at least until November.
"We may last after that but once winter sets in, which probably will be February or so, there's not much hope of surviving after that."
The mission was named Phoenix because it "rose up from the ashes" of a previous NASA Mars mission which was cancelled in 2001.
Smith was in Montreal last week to take part in the biennial meeting of the Committee on Space Research, which was founded 50 years ago.
The week-long assembly brought together about 2,000 space scientists from around the world.
The next meeting with be in Bremen, Germany, in 2010.
