I provided the landing photos! Please rate & comment. "Absolutely beautiful," said Dan McCleese, a chief scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It looks like a good place to start digging." Cheers swept through mission control when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nailbiting descent. Engineers & scientists hugged and high-fived one another.
This is from the live feed on Nasa Tv, With Mars Rover Phoenix, landing on mars & in here we have been waiting and found out that everything is working! The initial pictures were primarily to give engineers information on the condition of the lander including its power supply & the health of its science instruments. An image showed the lander unfurled its solar panels as planned after the dust settled. Initial results show Phoenix landed almost level, tilted at a quarter of a degree. "The hardest part is over. There's still a lot of drama left," said Goldstein, who kept up a JPL tradition by passing out bowls of lucky peanuts during the landing. Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph after a 10-month, 422 million-mile voyage through space. The lander kept in contact with Earth through the orbiting Mars Odyssey during the entire "seven minutes of terror."
NASA spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars & successfully landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life. Less than two hours later, the Phoenix Mars Lander beamed back four dozen black-&-white images including one of its foot sitting on Martian soil amid tiny rocks. Others included the horizon of the arctic plain & ground with polygon patterns similar to what can be found in Earth's permafrost regions.
