Phoenix Mars Lander Parachutes Down
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down safely near the Red Planet's north pole on Sunday, beginning its three-month investigation into the history of water on the fourth planet from the sun.
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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down safely near the Red Planet's north pole on Sunday, beginning its three-month investigation into the history of water on the fourth planet from the sun. The agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) snapped this image of Phoenix parachuting through the Martian atmosphere during its landing. To capture the image—the first taken by one spacecraft of a second craft landing on Mars—MRO controllers pointed the craft's telescopic camera HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) to where they calculated Phoenix would be. Then they hoped for the best. "We saw a few other bright spots in the image first, but when we saw the parachute and the lander with the cords connecting them, there was no question," HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona said in a NASA statement. Phoenix began transmitting images of its landing site on Sunday evening.
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