One day after Immaculate landing on Mars, NASA’s Phoenix Lander appeared in perfect health on Monday. Its perfect landing through Martian skies toward a polar landing site was snapped by sharp-eyed Mars orbiter.

The mission managers reported that they had drawn up contingency plans for possible problems and the spacecraft had redundant systems to survive the failure of some components. But, “Up to this point, we haven’t needed any of it,” said Edward Sedivy, the Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, which built the spacecraft.

It is using two satellites - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey - to communicate with controllers on Earth. The image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the planet's face and wonderful glimpse of the landing site. Now, Phoenix is ready to dig up the Martian land.

Scientists are planning to use Phoenix to dig beneath what is expected to be a thin layer of soil to sample underlying ice. They want to learn if the water was ever liquid, which is believed to be necessary for life.

"We're particularly interested in seeing what's in our digging area," said the lead scientist Peter Smith at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which oversees the mission.
   
Phoenix became the first spacecraft to reach a polar region of Mars safely. It completed a 10-month, 420-million-mile (676-million-km) voyage from Earth on Sunday. It landed on Mars at 4:53 p.m. PDT (7:53 p.m. EDT/2353 GMT) on Sunday.