This time there weren’t any imperial vs metric units frack-ups: the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down perfectly on the northern polar region of Mars, starting a three-month mission that will see the spacecraft digging in the dirt for frozen water and tiny green men.
NASA received the first signals at 7:53:44PM Eastern Time, which made engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the University of Arizona, Tucson, to jump on their seats overjoyed. We can’t blame them: this is just the third time in history that a spacecraft has completed a soft landing on the red planet, 32 years after Viking 2. Now we only have to wait a couple more days to see if everything, including the critical 7.7-foot-long robotic scoop arm, is in working condition.
[NASA]
hugh
Monday, May 26, 2008 at 7:36 PMout of interest did they use metric or imperial this time round?
zacislost
Monday, May 26, 2008 at 9:30 PMDid they see any Transformers?
alli
Monday, May 26, 2008 at 10:53 PMThrilled Phoenix touched down safely (yes, we watched it last night). Not so excited about the quote in the pic; in fact, I don’t get it: “my the fact that I was alive a second ago”? Is it just too early in the morning for me? Or someone else?
Socrates
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 1:46 PMIs it my imagination or is Phoenix pretty steampunk in design – all that brown and gold… Just check out that landing gear against the martian ground.