Phoenix, NASA's Mars Lander, landed successfully on Mars, 10 light minutes away from earth, on monday morning. Phoenix first used its heat shield to slow down in Mars' thin atmosphere, then opened a parachute, dropped the heat shield, then dropped the parachute and used small rocket engines to make a vertical soft landing on a predetermined place near the pole of Mars.Active control from Earth is not possible since it takes 10 minutes for a signal to reach Mars; the whole landing sequence took only 7 minutes. That means that it had already landed/crashed before ground control received the signals about the start of the atmosphere entry procedure.
"The mission has two goals. One is to study the geologic history of water, the key to unlocking the story of past climate change. The second is to search for evidence of a habitable zone that may exist in the ice-soil boundary, the "biological paydirt." " - wiki
One of the amazing things that I hoped would be possible is imaging a lander while performing its 7min landing on Mars, with a man made telescope satellite orbiting around Mars. Sounds like a hand-standing monkey on a goat on a cup on a tightrope to me. They did it, how cool is that? They designed the orbits of MRO(a Mars satellite with telescope) and Phoenix so that MRO could take pics of Phoenix's landing(decent on parachute).
And while standing on Mars (click for high res):
Here are the first images taken by Phoenix.
1 comment:
Awesome! Lets hope it finds signs of life.
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