The Phoenix has landed
NASA's Phoenix mission to the polar regions of Mars landed flawlessly this weekend. The mission's goal is to drill beneath the frozen surface and extract samples of ice and soil, which the lander can then subject to a battery of chemical tests. This is one more exciting mission in NASA's spectacular portfolio of robotic planetary exploration.
The breathless few moments during the lander's descent (which the Phoenix team called "seven minutes of terror") were very tense for the folks at Mission Control; anything could have gone wrong during the vehicle's 12,000 MPH descent, but everything worked smoothly. To me, it's practically a miracle that our scientists and engineers can build and execute something so precisely that it can hit a bullseye from millions of miles away, and every nuance and adjustment needed is entirely automated by on-board software.
Them's some smart people at NASA.
One of the most spectacular NASA images of recent years came back to Earth as the lander was making its descent. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter carries a camera called HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), which captured this image of Phoenix during its descent:
This unbelievable image, taken from hundreds of miles away, shows the lander plummeting toward the Martian surface with its parachute deployed above it; the parachute's tether lines are even visible. I'm frankly astounded at the technical skill necessary to make a landing mission like this work at all, but I'm left speechless and awestruck by the fact that NASA's engineers could direct a satellite, orbiting a planet millions of miles away, to capture a fleeting image of a second craft traveling thousands of miles an hour through its field of vision.
As Bad Astronomy said about the technical prowess symbolized by this image:
Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.
Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.
One commenter on that post compared the above image to the "Blue Marble" image of the Earth taken from the Moon by Apollo 17. I think it's an apt comparison.
Now, if we'd just devote that same brain power to our energy problems ...