The big news of the weekend is that the Mars Phoenix Lander has, in fact, landed. It touched down in the northern hemisphere at about 6pm (Calgary time) on Sunday. All seems well, and all systems are, as they say, a go.
Here’s one of the first images to be sent back from Vastitas Borealis (the Northern Wastelands).
Two special points need to be made about the Phoenix. The first is that this is the first controlled descent landing in a long time (since Viking, in 1976, in fact). All of the recent landings have involved air bag softened collisions with the surface. The second is that this is the northern most landing on Mars, at 68 degrees north latitude.
There are four broad goals to the Phoenix program (including the ever popular “prepare for human landing”), but the main mission is to find water. Previous orbiters have discovered indirect evidence of water, but Phoenix will dig for the frozen stuff with a specially designed “frozen stuff digger tool“.
And of course, the Canadian Space Agency has supplied the Meteorological package (a fancy word for “weather station”).
The latest news can be found here (from the official NASA site).
