If all goes right, in June 2008, a small piece of the Palouse will be stabbing into the northern polar ice cap of Mars.

Pullman-based Decagon Devices Inc., founded in 1983 by former WSU soil scientist Gaylon Campbell, has 44 employees researching, creating and marketing products that have applications in foods, pharmaceuticals, biology, forestry, soil sciences, and now, researching Mars. The Phoenix Lander is planned to land May 2008 in the northern polar region of Mars, and expose the upper few feet of surface material using a robotic arm to find the ice discovered by the Odyssey mission in 2002.

The history of this ice and its interaction with the Martian atmosphere will be studied throughout the three-month primary mission. Decagon Devices’ thermal and electrical conductivity probe is part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer portion of the Phoenix Lander. “I’m pretty much over the ‘wow’ factor,” said Doug Cobos, a research scientist with Decagon Devices. Cobos has been working on the Phoenix Lander device for 18 months and has made several revisions during that time.

“This here,” Cobos said, pointing to the device, “is the reason I came to work for Decagon.” Cobos said that during his time on the project, he has built several prototypes for testing and added on a few features. “There may or may not be a meteorology system going up on the lander,” Cobos said. “So, now our device is also going to measure wind speed, temperature, soil temperature and humidity.” Cobos said ice on Mars tends to go directly from the solid form into a vapor. By finding out if the liquid form of water is possible on Mars, scientists can tweak their models and theories about how to support human life on the red planet, Cobos said.

The Phoenix Lander project’s goals are to verify the presence of water and habitable conditions, whether life ever arose on Mars, characterize the climate of Mars, characterize the geology of Mars and prepare for human exploration. Decagon Devices President Tamsin Campbell said while at an American Geophysicist Union trade show, somebody from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory stopped by their booth and learned they already had the needed technology.

“People flew up from JPL in Anaheim not long after that,” Campbell said. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory won the bid for the Phoenix Lander soon after, and Decagon Devices began seriously designing a model, Campbell said. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory wanted Decagon to keep their device to 200 grams. “We got it down to 100 grams,” Cobos said.

However, despite serious testing before launch in 2007, Cobos said he still fears the spacecraft taking a nosedive on the Martian surface.

“If it fails, you’ll probably find us curled up on the floor … whimpering,” Cobos added.