As you probably already know, the Phoenix Lander has finally landed on Mars, after a journey of many months through the depths of space. I'm not as involved on this mission as I am on the Mercury Mission, but the Phoenix team was here a couple of months ago to get our opinion on what they should be looking for during the several weeks they spent in Antarctica last winter (Antarctic summer) as a trial run for the mission. One of their labs was also located across the hall from the lab of my friend's boyfriend at Tufts in Massachusetts.

We have one of the most spectacular telescopes ever built in orbit around Mars, that's the HiRISE camera, which sends back pictures of the surface at a resolution of about 35 cm per pixel. That's way better than the resolution we have for the Earth from orbit (at least publicly available...) and you can see way more because there isn't so much pesky vegetation in the way. Because the Phoenix Lander's descent was such a special event, they skewed the HiRISE camera to a crazy angle and took a high resolution shot of where the engineering team thought that the lander would be. Turns out the engineering team was spot-on, and they caught the lander in the act of parachuting through the Martian atmosphere.



How freakin' sweet is that. Plus, we've all been really worried because the whole point of the lander is to dig for ice, but if the lander happens to land in an area where the ice table is really deep, the mission is sol because it doesn't have any wheels. [The robotic arm can dig maybe ~30-40cm or so. Its goal is to find ice and then heat it up in an oven. The gases that come off of the sample can be analyzed in a miniature mass spectrometer, which can tell us if there are any organics present. It also has a bunch of other experiments that are designed to look for signs of life. I have my own theories about what else we could do with these ovens, but there are only four of them and they can each only be used once.]

But luckily for the Phoenix, it seems to have landed right on top of very thinly covered ice...!


They aren't totally sure yet that this is ice- but the jets on the spacecraft blew away a substantial quantity of dust, and it's possible that this has exposed an ice table lying just below the surface. My friend Joe's job is to study this landing area and the processes that are going on here. He's been to Antarctica several times to study similar landscapes. He's going to give us an update on Monday about the mission and whether or not this is really ice. I will, in turn, pass on the update to you.

For more information, check out the Phoenix website.

Exciting times in space science!

Daaang
That is some CRAZY resolution on that shot....you can see the parachute and everything with ridiculous detail for being shot an entire planet away. I heart technology...

What's also sweet digging for ice and signs of life....if there's water on Mars, what implications does that have for mankind? Hmmm.....how big is the Phoenix Lander?
» The-Muffin-Man on 2008-05-31 10:33:32

A bunch of people in my building work with HiRISE stuff. I remember some lady (I forgot her name even though we work on the same floor) was saying how these images are so high res that if you blow them up to full size, they'd cover over a hundred or so computer monitors.

Imagine the desert landscapes you'd uncover if you used that camera to take your Facebook self-pics!
» ranor on 2008-05-31 11:12:09

Also, on the wedding front...
...of course Will's invited. I mean, he's the whole reason we met in the first place. You'd think that it would be awkward for us to invite our mutual ex to our wedding, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. A real traditional English gentleman, that one. Well, except for the whole "heteroflexible" thing.
» ranor on 2008-06-01 12:33:55

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