The phenomenal HiRISE camera which snapped Phoenix beneath its parachute has now seen Phoenix sitting on the Martian surface. In fact, it sees the lander, the parachute, the back shell and the heat shield!

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona; click to embiggen

This is quite an extraordinary picture. The Phoenix lander is bluish and sits at the top of the field. You can see dust disturbed around it, no doubt from the exhaust of the landing thrusters as it descended. At the bottom is the bright parachute, and just above it is the back shell; the part of the apparatus that connected the parachute to the lander. To the right center is the heat shield, blackened by its fiery descent. It must have bounced when it hit, making the blurry splotch to the left of the better-defined shield itself. And, of course, zooms are provided. Looks like the back shell bounced a bit too, or was dragged a little by the parachute.

[edited to add: Oops! In the next paragraph, I got the descent path going the wrong way. In the comments, To Seek made a good point: the heat shield would still be moving rapidly when it was ejected from the lander, while the lander was slowing due to the drag from the ‘chute. I forgot about momentum and which part of the lander was slowing! So the actual entry angle is from the upper left, moving to the lower right. Everything else is pretty much the same though.]

To my eye, it looks like the lander came in from the lower right upper left. The heat shield fell before the parachute was disconnected, then the lander landed. The winds must have been blowing roughly down and to the left a little, since the parachute was disconnected before the lander touched down as well. That’s consistent with the shell being dragged a little bit toward the bottom of the picture. The scattered dust also seems to be blown down and to the left as well. I’m not sure why the heat shield would have bounced up and to the right, but maybe it hit a rock or a slight incline. Otherwise I’d expect it to be up below and to the left right of the blotch, along the ground track of the descent. Or I may be totally wrong here. Edited to add: I was!

For a sense of scale, the solar panels are about 5.5 meters (roughly 18 feet) tip to tip across the lander. That’s about 22 pixels in this image. That puts the (approximate) distances of the parts from the lander as 50 130 meters to the heat shield, 100 250 meters to the parachute, and 90 230 meters to the back shell. So basically everything you’re seeing here would fit comfortably inside a couple of football stadiums.

Holy Haleakala.

Well, I’ll spare you the histrionics this time, and just say wow. Nice work HiRISE folks! And my sincere and heartfelt congratulations to NASA and everyone who worked on this amazing series of events!

I have a sneaky suspicion that I will never be able to keep up with the Mars Phoenix mission and still be able to write about it when something special happens, so if you need your fix of the latest and greatest, here are some places to go:

NASA’s page, of course.

The Arizona Phoenix page has lots of great background info.

Emily’s blog at The Planetary Society.

Chris Lintott has been keeping tabs, and has videos of interviews with scientists on the Phoenix mission.

You never know what the HiRIse team will have.

AstroProf has a nice post explaining what a "sol" is. Harkens back to my own post about the length of the year, actually.

Universe Today will always have article, of course, too!

Know any more? Leave ‘em in the comments! You can use HTML to make the links, but it might get snagged by the spam filter. I check that pretty often, so don’t fret if it gets swept up.

Emily has what is simply The Coolest Picture Ever. It is that simple.

That is exactly what you think it is: Phoenix descending to the Martian surface underneath its parachute. This incredible shot was taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can easily see the ‘chute, the lander (still in its shell) and even the tether lines!

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.

In 1999, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, sent to the unexplored south pole of Mars, was lost just before it was supposed to land. It is unknown what happened, but it’s assumed the debris (or the simply uncommunicative probe) is on the surface of Mars.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking lots of incredible high-res images of the planet, including the likely areas where MPL hit. However, that’s a lot of data to sift through! So the HiRISE folks have put the data together, and they’re asking you, me droogs, to help them look. Maybe you’ll be the first person to see the doomed spacecraft since it was lost!

The HiRISE camera onboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter keeps churning out incredible images of Mars. This one is very cool, but it’s not obvious why at a glance:

I had to look at it for a moment to realize how amazing it is: there is a scarp (very steep and tall cliff) going across the bottom right corner, and it’s the shadow of that scarp cutting across the image that suddenly gives you a sense of looking right down a cliff.

Yowza. The full view is beautiful as well.

Also, check out the boulder race on Mars! Some of my favorite images are ones that imply (or show direct evidence of) motion. Mars is still a dynamic planet.

Mars has two dinky moons, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos is the bigger of the two, and is about 22 kilometers (13 miles) across. There have been hi-res images of Phobos taken in the past, but none like this!

That’s the creepily good HiRISE camera from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, that took the image. Click it to embiggen and get much higher-res versions: the raw data has a resolution of 7 meters per pixel. That’s smaller than a house. There have been more detailed images taken in the past, but these collected more light from the tiny moon and so have better quality.

The detail is remarkable. The image is false color, and blue may represent fresher material.

The crater Stickney on the right is huge compared to the moon; if the impactor had been any bigger or moving faster it would have shattered the moon. The long parallel grooves were probably formed as stress fractures in the impact. Check out the awesome image of the crater itself. Wow.

And if that’s not enough, pull out your red/green glasses and take a gander at the 3D anaglyph they made. The tiny craters really stand out… uh, I mean, stand in. Whatever. They’re cool, so take a look.

And do it while you can. Eventually Phobos will crash into Mars, and that’ll be that. Chances are that by then we’ll boost it to a higher orbit ourselves (it makes a handy base), but still. Coolness prevails on Mars.

Hat tip to BABloggee and HiRISE guy Timothy Reed, who tells me he "lovingly installed and aligned all the optics".

The folks at HiRISE have released another interesting and beautiful (false color) image of Mars. This time it’s a crater that has, of all things, terraced walls. This may indicate that ice under the surface was vaporized upon impact, then condensed and rained back down, eroding the crater walls.

I wouldn’t go so far to say that this indicates water on Mars, of course, since it’s indirect evidence of transient liquid water. It’s not even conclusive evidence of that. I’ve seen ditches on Earth that have eroded into terrace-like structures without rainfall; usually when the dirt has been compressed over time (like on the edge of a road) and there is some erosive force present like wind or even passing cars applying pressure and crumbling the ditch sides. There is more to this Martian story; debris on the floor of the crater looks like something was flowing, which adds to the idea of water. Maybe.

Still, it’s interesting, and worth putting into the category of "pictures motivating us to continue looking for water." Also, the full scale image shows the terrain in context, with lovely entrained sand dunes on the surface as well.

Tip o’ the Martian umbrella to Steven Charles Raine for sending me this.