Phoenix Mars Lander (large images presumably to follow)

"It is most gratifying that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives ... thank you."

they seem happy about the landing angle.

lets see if we get a debrief about the EDL telemetry.

Nice to see Jesse "The Body" Ventura there giving his congratulations.

No, wait, Elvis, it'll be something like this:

"We said all these worlds are yours, but we didn't mean THIS world."

They should totally slip some clips of The Martian Chronicles over the webstream just to fuck with people.

Supposedly, the solar panels open up in fifteen minutes (gives time for the dust to settle). After that, then photographs.

"It's a midwestern town, sir! Wanna go stay at your parents' place for the night?"

At least some pictures of this angry red fellow:

http://www.scifidimensions.com/Mar00/mars_a5.jpg

"Welcome to Malacandra! DO NOT BRING YOUR EVIL HERE."

"There's some fat bastard in a red suit telling us to get off his land or he'll sic the elves on us."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/31/Marvinthemartain.jpg

"Oooh I'm so angry I'll have to use the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator"

"No, no, you want the Lost Sea of Korus. That's on the other side of the planet!"

"Sir, Sax Russell is bothering me about some stupid project again."

Anyway, believe they said that more info should be along in a few minutes...

Sounds like all the basic equipment is checking out for transmitting etc.

link for future photos as they arrive http://fawkes4.lpl.arizona.edu/gallery.php

somebody said big photos right?
http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/05/25/lg_313.jpg

http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/05/25/lg_310.jpg

http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/05/25/lg_318.jpg

A nice flat landscape to work with (not a complaint, looks like it was an ideal landing location!)

Nice detailed briefing going on now -- sounds like it was a near-textbook landing all around, great to see.

Me, excited: man, isn't it great, that a bunch of monkeys like us can land on another planet?

Annoying collegue: oh look, rocks. Yay. Well, that was worth every penny, wasn't it?

:-(

Your annoying colleague is very annoying.

This is the only thing countering my glumness on a rainy Monday morning. If a landing on another planet can't improve your day, what can?

"This is an approximate-color image taken shortly after landing by the spacecraft's Surface Stereo Imager, inferred from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter."

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/230118main_false_color_postcard.jpg

Annoying collegue: oh look, rocks. Yay. Well, that was worth every penny, wasn't it?

I can't bring myself to be even slightly excited by these photos either, but I guess this isn't the probes main mission anyway.

It's not the photos themselves that are exciting, it's that the photos are being taken...on Mars. And that here it's 2 PM on a rainy Monday in May, but there it's "17:00:35 local solar time at the Phoenix site on the mission's Martian day, or Sol, 0."

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/multimedia/index.html

Watch the "Phoenix Landing: Nerves and Joy" video it's the flight controller reporting the EDL telemetry synced with the CGI depiction and the cheering best buy guys.

For a bank holiday, there seemed to be an awful lot of people in this here astrophysics department when I arrived, but then I remembered this was going on.

Apparently that square in the surface is a signature of water ice.

My friend works on Sky at Night. Patrick Moore shot several links into a late addition about Phoenix that they're filming later this week. "We're sad to say Phoenix burnt up on entry, here's Chris with more", "We haven't heard from Phoenix, here's Chris with more", etc. I guess this means they're going to use the "Good news, everyone!" link.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5b_81Uety2c

Permafrost features on earth

lol nerds. the fact that they dropped the lander from 1000 meters w/ only its engines to dampen the landing is like o_O

OMG WAIT WHATS THAT!

http://i28.tinypic.com/91fjis.jpg

heat shield

apparently this thing is set up 0.6° to E-W. They were shooting for exactly E-W to maximize light collecting abilities and the ammount of shade available for the arm to dig in. 0.6° = wow.

http://members.shaw.ca/david.p.z.888/star_wars/pics/obi-wan_kenobi.jpg

OMG WAIT WHATS THAT!

oh noes! it's a pink arrow!

apparently this thing is set up 0.6° to E-W. They were shooting for exactly E-W to maximize light collecting abilities and the ammount of shade available for the arm to dig in. 0.6° = wow.

-- caek, Monday, May 26, 2008 10:00 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

E-W = east-west axis?

i can't wait to go to mars

Yeah they basically sent it 400,000,000 miles and nailed the bullseye.

An obvious waste of our tax resources oh wait.

What are the chances this is 100% what we think it is and they're not secretly doing some secret military secret stuff like, er, looking for radioactive oil or something?

Oh, and if there's any life anywhere on Mars (or anywhere else) and they're reading this: hide! If humans find you you're only going to be dissected & freezedried & shit!

I was at a BBQ party as the photos were coming in - so I was watching all this on my phone in one hand, a beer in the other, and I suddenly had a "hey, the future is pretty cool after all" sartorial moment

OK, this is pretty fantastic...

May 26, 2008 PASADENA, Calif. -- A telescopic camera in orbit around Mars caught a view of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute during the lander's successful arrival at Mars Sunday evening, May 25.

The image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter marks the first time ever one spacecraft has photographed another one in the act of landing on Mars.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/phoenix/collection_16/9227-PHX_Lander_800-600.jpg

What are the chances this is 100% what we think it is and they're not secretly doing some secret military secret stuff like, er, looking for radioactive oil or something?

Possible, I suppose, but ESA would have to be in on any radioactive oil type thing, which would make it a pretty hard secret to keep.

x-post -- Wow, that's wonderful. I love the fact that stuff like this might become even more common with time.

What are the chances this is 100% what we think it is and they're not secretly doing some secret military secret stuff like, er, looking for radioactive oil or something?

I've generally assumed that if there was secret operations going on then the funding for these missions would be fast-tracked (if not medium-tracked) and JPL wouldn't have to constantly beg on streetcorners for cash.

NASA/JPL is not sweating it financially compared to almost all other big ticket science in the U.S. and pretty much all other science worldwide.

(e.g. so fucked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Linear_Collider#Cost_and_time_estimates)

(which is not to say I think the 5.6 trillion dollars spent by the U.S. on its nuclear arsenal could not have been better spent, but NASA/JPL is one of the wealthiest public science bodies in the world and is not begging on street corners.)

NASA/JPL is one of the wealthiest public science bodies in the world and is not begging on street corners.)

True. But overall NASA has been reneging on promises that they originally made to the science programs in terms of the amount of funding that they would be getting.

In short, politics as usual. http://www.nasawatch.com/ gets nice and irate about this.

Snow on Mars! Such a beautiful image, would love to see it.

More on the snowfall at night

By the way, there's carbon-dioxide snow on Mars too

In 2008, we learned from the Phoenix Mars lander that it snows in Mars northern hemisphere — perhaps quite regularly – from clouds made of water vapor. But now, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data has revealed the clearest evidence yet of carbon-dioxide snowfalls on Mars. Scientists say this is the only known example of carbon-dioxide snow falling anywhere in our solar system.

“These are the first definitive detections of carbon-dioxide snow clouds,” said Paul Hayne from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead author of a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “We firmly establish the clouds are composed of carbon dioxide — flakes of Martian air — and they are thick enough to result in snowfall accumulation at the surface.”

Scientists have known for decades that carbon-dioxide exists in ice in Mars’ seasonal and permanent southern polar caps. Frozen carbon dioxide, sometimes called “dry ice” here on Earth, requires temperatures of about -125 Celsius (- 193 degrees Fahrenheit), which is much colder than needed for freezing water.

Even though we like to think Mars is a lot like Earth, findings like this remind us that Mars is indeed quite different. But just as the water-based snow falls during the winter in Mars’ northern hemisphere, the CO2 snowfalls occurred from clouds around the Red Planet’s south pole during winter in the southern hemisphere.