A NASA
orbiter caught this view of the Phoenix Mars Lander parachuting toward the
Martian arctic surface on May 25, 2008.
Phoenix
landed on Mars late Sunday, touching down on the arctic plains of Vastitas
Borealis and beaming its first signal back to Earth, which mission controllers
picked up at 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT). So far, the spacecraft
is in good health.
But it was
during Phoenix’s seven-minute
plunge through the Martian atmosphere that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter caught this view of the lander dangling from its precious parachute. It
is the first-ever view of a spacecraft landing on another planetary body.
The 30-foot
(10-meter) wide parachute is the white object on the right, with its connecting
chords running to the Phoenix lander’s back shell to the lower left. The parachute
appears to be fully deployed.
"This
is an engineer's delight," Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein said in
a mission update today at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"When this was first proposed, I was very skeptical."
MRO caught
this view of Phoenix from an altitude of about 472 miles (760 km) using its
High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.The HiRISE recorded
this image on May 25, 2008, at 4:36 p.m. Pacific Time (7:36 p.m. Eastern Time),
NASA officials said. It is a highly oblique view of the Martian surface, 26
degrees above the horizon, or 64 degrees from the normal straight-down imaging of
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and has a scale of 0.76 meters per pixel, they
added.
MRO was one
of three Mars-orbiting spacecraft to watch over Phoenix’s
landing on the red planet. NASA’s Mars Odyssey and Europe’s Mars Express
spacecraft also monitored the landing to serve as data relays for the Phoenix
lander.
Phoenix’s $422
million mission is aimed at digging beneath the frozen Martian arctic for water
ice, then testing it with onboard ovens, a wet chemistry lab and other
instruments to determine if the region could have been habitable in the past
for primitive life. The spacecraft is expected to perform for 90 Martian days,
or sols.
-- Tariq Malik
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University
of Arizona.
