Mission controllers for Phoenix Mars Lander decided Saturday afternoon to forgo the second-to-last opportunity for adjusting the spacecraft's flight path.
The NASA officials said Phoenix is so well on course for its Sunday-evening landing that the team decided it was not necessary to do a trajectory correction 21 hours before landing.
However, a correction maneuver eight hours before landing is still possible. Sunday at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time is the first possible time for confirmation that Phoenix has landed. The landing would have happened 15 minutes earlier on Mars, but the radio signals take 15 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth at the distance separating the two planets today.
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