Yeehah!!!! Phoenix Has Landed!

Safe and Sound

Well, the Phoenix Lander has made it to the surface of Mars, settling onto a flat spot in the Martian arctic. According to Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the mission, the lander is only a half-degree off from being completely flat. That’s some accomplishment!

The next one? Sending the first images back from the Phoenix Lander

Update: Here’s one of the first images from Mars sent by the Phoenix Lander. More are being uploaded, and you can explore to your heart’s content at the University of Arizona’s mission web page. These servers are getting slammed with a lot of hits, so be patient.

Below is the view from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which caught a glimpse of Phoenix on its final descent to the Mars surface.

Memorial Day on Mars

Exploring the Martian Arctic Tundra

There’s another spacecraft landing on Mars in a couple of days. It’s called the Mars Phoenix mission, and if all goes well (and it will be a tricky landing), the lander will settle down onto the Martian surface at a spot in the Martian arctic. After radioing its first greetings from the Red Planet back to mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lander will start studying the soil in a search for clues to the water history on Mars. If you want to follow along at home, check out the Phoenix site for details about the landing and NASA TV’s coverage schedule. If you happen to be in Tucson, Arizona (home of the Phoenix Mars mission, there will be landing day festivities, including a showing of a Mars show at Flandrau Planetarium that we produced called MarsQuest. There will also be Phoenix festivities around the country. Planetary Society has a list of events here. Check it out in person or online at the Phoenix Lander pages or at CNN’s Mission to Mars pages with Miles O’Brien! Wherever you watch, it’s history in the making.

I noticed that CNN is carrying a story now about the Phoenix Lander, called “Seven Minutes of Terror.” It’s focused on those last 7 minutes as the lander heads to the surface and tries a soft landing without the use of airbags, as some previous missions have done. It IS a stressful time for the mission team, since they won’t know for 20 minutes after the supposed landing time IF the spacecraft did get there safely.

Back when the Mars Polar Lander was supposed to do essentially the same mission as this one, I went out to JPL for the landing day events. The team tracked the signals from the craft all the way in, and then had to wait for the first “post landing” signals from the mission, telling them that all was well. Those 20 minutes were moments frozen in time. People were anxious, concerned, and as the minutes ticked by without a message, fatalistic about what happened to the lander. We never did get a signal, and the team was devastated. They, like others who have lost spacecraft they worked so hard to launch, had to grieve a loss and move on.

From what I’ve read, they’ve done everything they can this time to make sure the lander has a fighting chance to make it to the surface. It’s been built right (not “cheaper”, but better) and the science it will return is absolutely essential to understanding Mars and its long-gone (or hidden) water.

Rock on, Phoenix!!

Stalking the Wild Supernova

Rule 1: Be Prepared

Rule 2: Use Lots of Observatories

The big news about Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger’s observations of a supernova just beginning its explosion is one of those great stories that illustrates the saying “Chance favors the prepared mind.” A few months ago when both authors were writing an article about their find for GeminiFocus (a magazine on which I’m associate editor), I marveled at how lucky these two were. But, they were doing more than just being in the right place at the right time. They also had the capability to reach out and grab use of several observatories to get the best multi-wavelength view of the supernova (which blew up in the galaxy NGC 2770 (which lies some 88 million light-years away from us). Of course, SWIFT saw the first x-ray emissions from the supernova, and the astronomers noticed that right away. In short order, the pair alerted the astronomy community, and soon the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, the Gemini North and Keck 1 telescopes in Hawai’i, two telescopes at Palomar Observatory in California, and a telescope at Apache Point in New Mexico were all looking at this outburst.

The combination of observations from all this observatory “firepower” pins down the moments when the first x-rays began streaming from the star. Eventually this information will help astronomers understand the moment-by-moment events that occur when a massive star finally explodes as a supernova. It’s a look at stellar death throes that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago. Chance — and a lot of really good telescopes — really do favor the prepared astronomers who got this chance to look into the jaws of star death.