NASA Spacecraft Makes Historic Landing on Mars
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Phoenix sent back pictures of a flat landscape with few rocks ....The probe’s feet sat neatly on the surface, according to this picture A NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet’s northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.
Less than two hours later, the Phoenix Mars Lander beamed back four dozen black-and-white images including one of its foot sitting on Martian soil amid tiny rocks. Others included the horizon of the arctic plain and ground with polygon patterns similar to what can be found in Earth’s permafrost regions.
“Absolutely beautiful,” said Dan McCleese, a chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It looks like a good place to start digging.”
Cheers swept through mission control when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers and scientists hugged and high-fived one another.
“In my dreams it couldn’t have gone as perfectly as it went,” project manager Barry Goldstein said. “It went right down the middle.”
The initial pictures were primarily to give engineers information on the condition of the lander including its power supply and the health of its science instruments. An image showed the lander unfurled its solar panels as planned after the dust settled.
Initial results show Phoenix landed almost level, tilted at a quarter of a degree.
“The hardest part is over. There’s still a lot of drama left,” said Goldstein, who kept up a JPL tradition by passing out bowls of lucky peanuts during the landing.
I thought it was waaaaay kewl that Phoenix landed on Mars just as we were commemorating the sacrifices of our armed forces, sacrifices that provide us with the freedom to keep exploring for good not evil.
