There is a nice video explainer of the mission here along with the rest of the story: http://floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080523/NEWS02/805230332
Does anyone else have a hard time wrapping the heads around this when it happens? Another effing planet!!! It just boggles the mind.
Thats cool but I wonder what the thinking was to wait for 11 missions before sending a lander to where the water is likely to be. There cannot be any colonization or explotation without it. You would think it would have been the first mission unless I am missing something
There should be images sent back a bit later this evening. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/
makes you kind of goose pimply all over It will be interesting to see whether in fact the planet is spawning men to send to earth
I wish this mission was capable to doing more definitive test for life but that is going to be for future missions. On a side note, the JPL team just answered Crunch's question. The earlier missions were to confirm that there was water on the planet and this mission was to find the most likely place to find water based on past studies. This craft was sent last because its life expectancy will be very brief as they predict that it will soon be covered in meter of frozen carbon dioxide.
Did anyone catch the live broadcast on the Science channel? Was cool to watch all those guys in mission control.
I watched the live feed on NASA channel. The Discovery channel had a little lag in the feed. It was very exciting !
Amazing. That first picture is scary lol. Could you imagine seeing Joey Porter walking around there, it would be craptacular!
NASA has long been set on the idea of "following the water" in its search for the possibility of live on other planets. The mission planners for Phoenix tried to set the lander down far enough away from the Mars polar caps (where the lander would not survive), but still in an area where frozen water might still be found beneath the soil. This is one of today's images from Mars.
Someone should've mailed NASA a color camera to duct tape on. Yeesh. I realize there's scientific value in black and white imagery, but you'd think they would include a second color camera, too.