The Phoenix Has Landed!

NASA's latest mission to Mars, the Phoenix Lander, successfully touched down about 3 hours ago now in the northern region near the pole. This lander is different as its designed not as a rover, but as a stationary instrument, meant to study soil samples and dig down into the surface of Mars and potentially study the subsurface ice. There's also weather instrumentation, so in conjunction with the orbiter studies of the Martian atmosphere can be conducted. This is also the first mission that is being lead by a university, the U. of Arizona.


The first images recently became available and are wicked! Not like where the rovers have been - very flat, and very small, angular rocks.

This is one of the first images released from NASA of the Martian surface at the Phoenix lander site.

Color photos are expected to be available soon as well!

Here's links to the sites and images as they'll be made available - keep in mind some are very slow right now due to everyone going to take a peek!

Phoenix Mars Mission at U. of Az http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/
(If you can get into the image page, when you click on an image it will take you to their viewer, however it may not be loading at the moment again due to so much traffic, but you can click on the links to the right where it says 'Download Image' and it'll open it in a new window!)

NASA Phoenix Site http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/

Did you know the lander twitters too? http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix