The U.S. space agency said Friday that it plans to again search for signs of life on Earth's neighbour planet Mars by launching the Phoenix probe in August 2007. Phoenix was expected to search for ice and signs of previous or existing life on the Red Planet's north pole in a project that was to cost 386 million dollars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said from Pasadena, California. After landing on the arctic pole, Phoenix's robotic arm will drill into the ground and collect rock samples, which will immediately be analyzed inside the space probe. NASA chose the arctic location after the space capsule Odyssey found ice under the surface of both poles after having circled the planet. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, the two Mars rovers now on the Red Planet, Phoenix is a stationary probe. The financially struggling NASA approved the project mainly because of its cost-saving properties. For instance, many of the scientific instruments that will be used on Phoenix were already developed for the Mars Polar Lander, a probe that crashed on Mars in 1999. --SP 2148 Local Time 1848 GMT
