The first of the two days needed to set up Mars Lander’s robotic arm ended successfully, after the mission had been postponed by 24 hours due to an unexpected glitch on Tuesday. The UHF radio system used by NASA’s Reconnaissance Orbiter to communicate with the Mars Lander had gone into a standby mode Tuesday, preventing new commands to be sent to Phoenix.

Despite the radio glitch that prevented remote commands to be issued in time for the Mars Lander, Phoenix is in perfect health, JPL’s Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager, said on Wednesday.

As it finally received commands to unstow its robotic arm, the Mars Lander took more pictures of the landing site earlier today, scientist from NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission from the University of Arizona, Tucson, unveiled.

With the help of the robotic arm, Phoenix will start digging for clues and take samples from the Martian soil. The arm, which has four joints and was designed to be as flexible as possible, will be unstowed in stages over a period of two days.

As Bob Bonitz of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena explained, the arm will be unstowed in a series of seven moves, beginning with the rotation of the wrist to release the forearm, and continuing with another series of moves to release the elbow from its launch restrains and move it from underneath the biobarrier.

With the help of the robotic arm, Phoenix will start taking soil samples from the surface, the icy layer and in between, while the advanced instruments onboard will analyze them. The Mars Lander’s mission is to establish whether the Martian environment contains carbon and water, two key elements to life, and whether this is or has ever been a possible habitat for life.

With the help of sharp color images sent by Phoenix, scientists are trying to recreate a panorama image (now one-third complete), which will allow them to identify the polygons they need. The images were taken by Phoenix’s Surface Stereo Imager on landing day, and on first two “sols” or Martian days.

The Surface Stereoscopic Imager records panoramic views of the surroundings from atop a mast on the lander. Its images from two cameras situated about as far apart as a pair of human eyes provide three-dimensional information that the Phoenix team will use in choosing where to dig and in operating the robotic arm.

The panorama should be complete in Sols 3 or 4, according to Surface Stereo Image co-investigator Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University. “These images are very exciting to the science team,” he continued.

The landing spot proved to be ideal for the mission. Phoenix appears to have set itself on the edge of a trough, an ideal place for the digging operations.

However, the robotic arm will start digging in an area on the panorama, but outside the initial polygon, which they consider a “keep out” zone or the first natural park system on Mars that needs further consideration.

The first samples fed into the Mars Lander’s analyzers will come from the surface. Decisions about how much deeper to go before analyzing another sample will depend on results from the surface material and on what the robotic arm camera and stereo imager see in the soil.

This mission in particular will be very challenging, considering that everyone expects Phoenix to confirm pro-Martian life theories and infirm the pessimistic approach according to which life on Mars is unlikely to have ever existed.