20071776 Club
A university, not NASA, leads a Mars lander off the pad at Cape Canaveral
The Phoenix spacecraft, built from a canceled lander pulled out of storage, is bound for ice under the Martian arctic soil.
A gamma-ray reading from the Mars Odyssey orbiter had found the telltale signature of hydrogen just under the planet's northern soil, a possible sign of buried water ice. Before dawn on August 4, 2007, a Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying the Phoenix Mars lander toward that spot. The University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory led the $420 million mission, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory managing the project, the first Mars mission ever run by a public university…
