The Phoenix has landed!

indeed...for over an hour now

and jeez, for those who don't know, this isn't the "fenix" we're so used to, its a mars lander we've sent up in orbit that successfully landed on the Surface of Mars



behold the rise of the Phoenix

First images are in and up on the Arizona Website!
(http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=0&cID=7)

Foot pads appear to be in good position, solar panels opened! Everything seems to be going perfectly.:rock:

We watched the live coverage on the Canadian Discovery Channel. It was pretty tense when they were counting down the height because at first it wasn't obvious it was decelerating.

Congratulations to NASA and JPL.

Greg

I've been watching NASA TV all afternoon. I agree as they were counting down the altitude it seemed to be dropping faster than I imagined it would all the way till under 100m.

Can't wait to see the science that comes from this over the next 3 months.

I've managed to find a flash animation of the probe's landing if anyones interested
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080525m.html

Thank you to everyone for this interesting thread !

:twothumbs
_

PhantomPhoton said:

I agree as they were counting down the altitude it seemed to be dropping faster than I imagined it would all the way till under 100m.

Click to expand...

This is the first lander in a very long time that I'm aware of that's used retro-rockets to land - if you remember the Pathfinder and all the landers since then have used airbags, in keeping with NASA's recent "smaller, faster, cheaper" philosophy. It's good to see that they're fudging a bit on the cheaper part; Pathfinder was $120 million, Phoenix rings in at just under $500 million (the big lander most people think of, Viking, came during a time when there was still plenty of money being thrown around; it also had retro-rockets, as it should have for *2 billion* dollars.)