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Engineers with NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission are trying to extend the lander’s survival by gradually shutting down some of its instruments and heaters.

Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic.

As expected, with the Martian northern hemisphere shifting from summer to fall, the lander is generating less power due to shorter days and fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels.

At the same time, the spacecraft requires more power to run several survival heaters that allow it to operate even as temperatures decline.

“If we did nothing, it wouldn’t be long before the power needed to operate the spacecraft would exceed the amount of power it generates on a daily basis,” said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

“By turning off some heaters and instruments, we can extend the life of the lander by several weeks and still conduct some science,” he added.

Over the next several weeks, four survival heaters will be shut down, one at a time, in an effort to conserve power.

The heaters serve the purpose of keeping the electronics within tested survivable limits.

As each heater is disabled, some of the instruments are also expected to cease operations. The energy saved is intended to power the lander’s main camera and meteorological instruments until the very end of the mission.

Later today, engineers will send commands to disable the first heater.

That heater warms Phoenix’s robotic arm, robotic-arm camera, and thermal and evolved-gas analyzer (TEGA), an instrument that bakes and sniffs Martian soil to assess volatile ingredients.

Shutting down this heater is expected to save 250 watt-hours of power per Martian day.

The Phoenix team has parked the robotic arm on a representative patch of Martian soil. No additional soil samples will be gathered.

The thermal and electrical-conductivity probe (TECP), located on the wrist of the arm, has been inserted into the soil and will continue to measure soil temperature and conductivity, along with atmospheric humidity near the surface.

The probe does not need a heater to operate and should continue to send back data for weeks.

Throughout the mission, the lander’s robotic arm successfully dug and scraped Martian soil and delivered it to the onboard laboratories.

According to Ray Arvidson, the robotic arm’s co-investigator, and a professor at Washington University, St. Louis, “We turn off this workhorse with the knowledge that it has far exceeded expectations and conducted every operation asked of it.”

As the White House hailed India’s maiden moon mission as “encouraging” and “exciting”, Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama saw it as a reminder to revitalise the US space programme and not let other countries surpass it.

“I haven’t spoken to the President (George Bush) about it. I saw that story, it was very interesting,” White House spokesperson Dana Perino said on Wednesday. “We noted it’s very encouraging for India, I’m sure, very exciting.”

However, Obama viewed Wednesday’s historic launch of India’s moon mission Chandrayaan I from Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh as a challenge.

“With India’s launch of its first unmanned lunar spacecraft following closely on the heels of China’s first spacewalk, we are reminded just how urgently the United States must revitalise its space programme if we are to remain the undisputed leader in space, science, and technology,” he said.

Obama said his comprehensive plan to revitalise the US “space programme and close the gap between the Space Shuttle’s retirement and its next-generation replacement includes USD 2 billion more for NASA - but more money alone is not enough.”

“We must not only retain our space workforce so that we don’t let other countries surpass our technical capabilities; we must train new scientists and engineers for the next generation,” he said.

Obama said his “comprehensive space policy focuses on reaching new frontiers through human space exploration, tapping the ingenuity of our commercial space entrepreneurs, fostering a broad research agenda to break new ground on the world’s leading scientific discoveries, and engaging students through educational programmes that excite them about space and science.”

“As a child, I remember sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders and watching the Apollo astronauts return from a splashdown to Hickam Air Force Base, dreaming of where they had been,” he added.

“It inspired my imagination and gave me confidence in what we as Americans could achieve. It’s time for a space programme that inspires our children again,” said the Democratic nominee who is leading over his Republican rival John McCain in most opinion polls.

“As President, I will lead our space programme boldly into the 21st century - so when my daughters, and all our children, look up to the skies, they see Americans leading the way into the deepest reaches of our solar system,” Obama said.

The United States India Business Council (USIBC), representing 280 of the largest US companies investing in India, has also hailed India’s maiden moon mission with two US instruments on board as the beginning of long “relationship promoting the opening of the frontier of outer space.”

“This unique technology partnership in civil space exploration, which taps India’s highly skilled scientific expertise with American instrumentation furnished by Raytheon, beckons what we hope will be a long and mutually beneficial relationship promoting the opening of the frontier of outer space,” USIBC president Ron Somers said.

A new battery-powered truck, which will herald the next generation of sport-utility vehicles, might be driven by the next astronauts to land on the moon.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the new truck, which is being field tested in Arizona, US, has a six-wheel drive, active suspension, and computerized navigation, a mixture of old and new technology.

But, when the final model rolls out in 2019, only an exclusive group of highly trained professionals will get to drive it-the next astronauts to land on the moon.

The new lunar rover, informally known as the Chariot, is a prototype being developed as part of NASA’s Constellation program, which aims to put people back on the moon by 2020.

The current version combines 35 years of technological advances with lessons learned from the original “moon buggies” used during the Apollo missions of the 1970s.

One of the biggest modifications is an optional pressurized cabin that comes fully equipped with beds, a pantry, a waste-management system, and a pair of space suits, allowing astronauts to live and work “on the road” for up to two weeks.

“It’s important to keep the crew happy,” noted Mike Gernhardt, a veteran NASA astronaut who is helping design the Chariot at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “As long as the food’s good and the seats are comfortable, you can put up with a lot,” he added.

Ambrose and other engineers have been designing the new rover in part based on tips from Apollo astronauts.

To overcome the porpoising problem, for instance, the Chariot has a longer wheelbase and is outfitted with the same automatic stability control used to keep today’s sport-utility vehicles from rolling over.

Steering is controlled by a computerized navigation system, and all six wheels can turn in any direction or be individually lifted for greater maneuverability.

The craft also has two gears. The first gear tops out at 3 miles (5 kilometers) an hour, while second gear can safely reach 12 miles (20 kilometers) an hour.

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries allow the craft to venture up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) and back before needing a pit stop at a solar-power station.

One of the more unusual innovations is a pair of slip-on space suits attached to the back of the pressurized cabin.

The rover will need to pass several rounds of technical tests and budget reviews between now and 2019 before the design is finalized.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has traveled a long distance from the time it used to send off sounding rockets from makeshift launch pads at a fishing village called Thumba in Kerala in the late 1960s. Headed by a series of visionary chairmen, starting with the late Vikram Sarabhai, it has transformed itself into an institution of international repute.

Today, some of the world’s largest satellite manufacturers in the US and Europe plump for Indian remote sensing imagery and satellite subsystems. With its emphasis on self-reliance and indigenous knowhow, ISRO has been increasingly outsourcing the manufacture of satellites and launch vehicles to the private sector in India.

Private industry already handles around 60 per cent of the work of building launch vehicles and 30 per cent of it in satellite fabrication. According to present ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair, this allows the agency to focus more on research and development.

“In the last 10 years we have not increased the number of personnel employed at ISRO by even one per cent,” he says, “though our programmes have multiplied more than three-fold. This shows the extent of industrial participation.

In the long-run, I am sure some major industries will pitch in to build overall systems themselves.” ISRO boasts of a launch capability that offers up to 35 per cent cheaper launches than its counterparts in any other country.

The Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota has the potential to emerge as a major space launch hub, rivaling similar facilities in Europe and the US. But to make that happen, ISRO must compete harder with big players like NASA, Intelsat of Russia, Eutelsat of France, or JSAT Corp of Japan. As an ISRO official says, “Low cost in access to space is the mantra for success”.

In the future conventional boosters may make way for reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) whose low maintenance and quick turnaround time could cut launch costs to less than a tenth of current costs. It is with in mind that a moonstruck ISRO is developing technologies like air-breathing engines for an RLV too.