Phoenix Mars Lander Touchdown.

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http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080525-phoenix-mars-landing.html
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has apparently survived the fiery plunge through the Martian atmosphere and landed on the red planet's arctic plains, with mission scientists eagerly awaiting word on the health of the spacecraft.

The spacecraft touched down in the Vastitas Borealis plains within the Martian arctic circle, where it is slated to spend at least three months searching for water ice hidden away below the frozen surface.

Mission scientists here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) received the signal that Phoenix had landed at around 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT) today. (The probe's signals take about 15 minutes to traverse the 171 million miles (275 million km) between Mars and listening stations back on Earth.)
Fantastic news. Hope pretty pictures are on the way soon.
 
Excellent stuff. All this for the price of sending six blokes to the ISS for a week.
Yep. Im just hoping that in the near future we come up with a cheaper way to launch things into space. If we could do that, the possibilities would be endless on what we could send up.
 
Link? I'm curious now.

2B3A21F2-EDAC-40D3-4BB4500AF715240B.jpg
 
Those pics will have been taken to provide forensic evidence in the case that something went wrong during the landing -- it's important to have as much info as possible when trying to learn from mishaps.

It's not unprecedented for one civilian spacecraft to image another for a number of reasons, and you can bet the military-types do it all the time.
 
Seems the robotic arm is shorting out. Hope the nasa engineers can work a miracle and get it working properly.
 
Seems the robotic arm is shorting out. Hope the nasa engineers can work a miracle and get it working properly.

It isn't the arm.

It is the filament in an instrument that is supposed to vaporize samples. At least that is my understanding. Kind of like in a GC-MS. There are two filaments though. If it is like many instruments I worked with in the past it isn't really a problem as you can pick which filament to use, but it does mean that half as many samples will be able to be run before it wears out.
 
It isn't the arm.

It is the filament in an instrument that is supposed to vaporize samples. At least that is my understanding. Kind of like in a GC-MS. There are two filaments though. If it is like many instruments I worked with in the past it isn't really a problem as you can pick which filament to use, but it does mean that half as many samples will be able to be run before it wears out.
Ahh... thats what i get for listening to fox for my space news.
 
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