Monday, May 26, 2008

Phoenix on its chutes

Now how cool is this! The Phoenix Lander made a successful landing on Mars yesterday and while it was descending on its parachutes, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this image of Phoenix. This is the first time that an orbiter has gotten an image of a lander in flight around another planet. Like I said, now isn't this COOL! You can see the parachutes, and the lander that is still in its backshell as well as the lines connecting the parachute to the backshell, all against the backdrop of the Martian surface below. I'm sure the HiRise camera will also be returning images of the lander on the Martian surface and I think the first attempt at that should already have been made and is just awaiting analysis.

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1 Comments:

Blogger KB1LQC said...

Pretty amazing that you can see the chute and everything!

11:24 PM  

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