Goals: Phoenix was sent to Mars to search for evidence of past or present microbial life and to study geology and climate on the icy arctic plains of the Martian north pole. The lander's robotic arm could dig up to half a meter (20 inches) into the Martian soil and return it for analysis to a special bake-and-sniff oven.

Accomplishments: Phoenix verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002. Phoenix's cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth. The findings advance the goal of studying whether Mars could ever have been favorable to microbial life.