Mars Pheonix Lander to touch down in less than 7 hours
 

You can watch live coverege here - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ - Starting at 6 PM EST. Earliest possible for landing confirmation will be 7:53 PM EST.

-S

The landing is, well, lots of room for something to go wrong:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasat...ulation-th.jpg

Amazing if this all works perfectly. Hope for the best! :up:

-S

It's landed and it's in fne working order !! :up:

Woohoo, good on them! :up:

They sent a couple of pictures back from the landing. Really cool. However, it's shutting down for the night. Missions and exploration will commence tomorrow.

In honor of the landing, being the nerd I am, I flew the Phoenix Lander to Mars using the Orbiter spaceflight sim. Here's some pics I shot of the mission. :rock:

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/5...elaunchrf2.jpg


http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/2...ransit1hs7.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/4...pproachof9.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/6...arationkc4.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/6...ingmarsbp7.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/7...reentryoj0.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/4...anderdeqz5.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/8...xlandedbi7.jpg

I love Orbiter. :up:

At least they beat the odd's! 55% of all missions fail!:huh:

Yeah , now its only a 50/50 fail rate for missions to mars ;)

I watched the NASA tv live feed this morning and the various conference's afterwards - everyone involved has every right to be ecstatic , the whole thing ran like it was on rails:up:

Yep ! It was the first mission they had in a LONG time with not many "issues".

I hope they iron out the problems that cause the 55% mission failure rate before we send people there !

That is true worldwide, but NASA seems to have a much lower mission failure than the rest of the world. I'd say over 80%+ of their missions work to Mars.

Shut down for the night, but will they be able to turn it back on? I remember one probe had that problem.

Should be able to. They did it just yesterday.

The thing that ticks me off more than anything is that we could avoid all these problems if the government would just devote more funding to NASA to make improvements, but with our President against these scientific things (being a Christian/Creationist) and with our economy in such a bad state, finding extraterrestrial life on Mars is not the biggest concern... unfortunately. Then again, these budgetary cuts on NASA have been occurring since Apollo 11.

You know, this could very well be the biggest scientific expedition in history since Columbus discovered the New World. If we do find life... then it pretty much rewrites how we think of ourselves in the universe. Not only that, but it might also begin our glorious Atheist revolution and the birth of advanced logical times.

Still, if we don't find anything, then we've still got some cool samples to analyze and study further.

It simply amazes me that you can send something between 48 to 64 million miles miles depending on it orbit and have something land where you want it.

Try 10 times that - 411 million miles, and even more amazingly, it didn't even require a course correction before landing!

-S

The Phoenix Lander has a weather station that was made in Canada :rock:
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/0...rs-lander.html
Story from the launch ^^^.


RDP