[X] My Assistant

[SFJCody]

Congratulations to the Phoenix team! This is certainly terrain for a static lander: homogeneous on scales larger than the polygons.

Half of all the spacecraft to have survived landing on Mars are still active!

[slinted]

Does anyone have a filter guide. I looked around the net for one - but could not find.
Also the images at LPL are not listing their filter numbers so you have to guess what they are with trial and error.

Filter characteristics and filename conventions : Phoenix Surface Stereo Imager
As to the exact filenames, they can be found in this gallery at nasa.gov. The web addresses have the filename (eg ...SS000EFF896228409_10CA8R8M1.html) In that example, it's an R8 filter image.

[Stu]

(rubs eyes) Morning everyone...

Wow, I had an AMAZING dream... I dreamed I sat by my computer for, like, 9 hours, jumping in and out of chat rooms and talking with dozens, hundreds of UMSFers and people all around the world, all sharing a love of science and discovery and exploration, all looking forward to, then celebrating, the arrival of a probe at Mars...! I dreamed I sat here, crunching peanuts and watching the expressions on the faces of people in Mission Control change from 'apprehension' to 'fear' and then 'joy'... I dreamed that I leapt into the air as images of a pebble-strewn polar martian plain appeared on my screen, one after the other, dizzyingly fast, to a soundtrack of whoops and cheers and yells of delight...

Anyone else have that dream..?

[PFK]

watching the expressions on the faces of people in Mission Control change from 'apprehension' to 'fear' and then 'joy'... I dreamed that I leapt into the air as images of a pebble-strewn polar martian plain appeared on my screen, one after the other, dizzyingly fast, to a soundtrack of whoops and cheers and yells of delight...

Anyone else have that dream..?

Oh yes The two things that will linger in the memory are those mentioned above - the tension of the altitude countdown and its reflection in the faces of the team, and the first view. Wonderful stuff; just glad its a Bank Holiday here though I hope Phoenix aint expecting the day off...

[As old as Voyage...]

It was a great night and made all the better that we all enjoyed the tension and joy together.

That landscape looks so desolate but a mere centimetres below that surface lie such possibilities.

[kenny]

Given the extremely flat terrain, without obstructions, I'm expecting to see the parachute and backshell lying on the ground when we get photos of the other side of the spacecraft...

The bright object in the distance I'm sure is the backshell inverted to expose the shiny interior, as happened on both Spirit and Opportunity.

[Skyrunner]

I hope the parachute is a little closer.

I certainly hope it isn't any closer as that might spark another round of: "clearance fever". I hope the chute has pulled the backshell far away.

[Tesheiner]

No luck on my attempts to stitch the pictures downlinked up to now.
I'm using autostitch and although it works very well with the rovers pictures, it's failing to match these ones here: 1, 2, 3, 4. Any help?

[Alex Chapman]

Two quick questions:

1. Did NASA already pinpoint the exact location of the Phoenix Lander?
( newsarticle stated: 68.2 North - 234 East )
2. How long before Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will snatch a photo of the landing area?

Exciting times indeed

the other Phil

I don't know if you have found the answers to your questions but in case you haven't I thought I would give them ago.

1. The red circle on the attached image (taken from Emily's blog) is Phoenix’s estimated location and the associated error margin. We were told there is a 90% or so chance of it being in the red circle. It’s calculated from the UHF signals and the inertial measurement units on Phoenix. So really they just have a good idea where it is not an exact fix. If you notice it’s to a large degree outside the blue landing ellipse, the parachute opened 7 seconds after its nominal time. The reason for which is still not known.

2. AS for MRO imaging they will be trying today based on the estimated position and they think they should have Phoenix imaged in just a few days.

[jaredGalen]

What kind of downlink are we expecting in terms of images etc?

I'm so used to the Firehose photostreamTorrent from the rovers that my expectations are probably a bit too high

Congrats to all involved also, Mars is a busy place these days.

[Ant103]

What a wonderful night (do you ear the song ? ).

So, an other try with the 3 pointings made probably in red and blue filters. I have made a synthetic green layer to have the RVB trichromy.

Other pics (solar panels pan and anaglyph of pod) are here, a special page of my website : http://www.astrosurf.com/merimages/Images_de_phoenix.html

[tedstryk]

This has been incredible. I was able to follow it on my phone and see the first pics when they were released. I tried to post here, not sure what happened to it. Congratulations to the Phoenix team!

[MichaelT]

What a night! I also stayed up until the first pictures came down and went to bed around 4:30 am
That makes working today quite hard.
Thank you everybody for posting these fantastic pics! I am so excited about this new mission and hope to see the first Martian water ice soon!

I just found what seems to be a "true" color image of the horizon, on Spiegel Online:

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltall...,555297,00.html
I could not find it on the NASA pages, however.

Edit: Now I did: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/...r_postcard.html
It is an approximate-color image "inferred from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter".

The colors are very close to what we already know from the two rovers, I think.

Congratulations to the Phoenix-Team! Outstanding job! Can't wait to see more!

Michael

[Leither]

Other pics (solar panels pan and anaglyph of pod) are here, a special page of my website : http://www.astrosurf.com/merimages/Images_de_phoenix.html

Ant

Your anaglyph of the pad is just great - is it just me or has Phoenix broken thro' a surface crust? Is that a bit of the ice crust poking up?

[pechisbeque]

Hey people,

I'm one of the hundreds of people that have been lurking here yesterday!

For my first post I have a question: does anyone know what was the event that triggered the parachute deploy? I'm wondering if it was a specific altitude, speed, density, or something else. If it's something like that, then the Martian atmosphere models will have to be recalculated. The 7 seconds delay of the parachute deploy at that speed caused a significant deviation from the center of the landing ellipse.