Mars Phoenix lander to touch down on the red planet tonight
By Ryan Block 
posted May 25th 2008 4:35PM
posted May 25th 2008 4:35PM
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Phoenix mission page
Read - NASA live video feed
Read - NASA Mission Control liveblog
there is also a live event show about it on discovery science. it starts at 7 eastern time and 6 central. its suppose to have lots of live footage.
Encounters Ryan, not "encouners"
touchdown well done nasa
Giddy as schoolboys.
EPIC SUCCESS
Yep, the Phoenix has landed.
I welcome my alien-enthusiast overlords:
come on Ice Alien Yetis.
gotta give it to the guy that replied, he's spot on.
Science Channel HD and CNN will also be hosting live shows/feeds starting at 7:00pm ET
could it crash?
lawl... there goes several million dollars.
Sure. any number of components could fail, it could land on a boulder and wreck itself, or aliens could shoot it down.
Unfortunately if it crashes we won't be able to see it.
I would say the chances of it crashes are better than 50%. There is probably a reason NASA abandoned retro-rocket landings on other planets. It's like shotting a bullet from NY to Los Angeles and hitting your target.
That being said, I sure am pulling for this to have a successful landing.
maybe if NASA wants to do a live broadcast of their events they could make the "pre-show" a bit less of an ULTRA YAWN... those blue shirts look nice and all, but i'm falling asleep here.
oh nevermind... i guess that was the pre-pre-show... the real pre-show is actually informative...
nope!
They'll call it 'the red screen of death'.
its gonna get bombed
Exciting!
After Spirit and Pathfinder(?) this just seems so unambitious. Millions of dollars just to stand still is so Viking Lander.
Btw, why on Earth (no pun) have we never put a full motion camera on one of these things? NASA could reap millions from an IMAX movie of a real trip across Mars in 3D
@Fred I think its partly to do with bandwidth/the distance the signal goes to get here. Also as I understand it, in this case(maybe the 2 latest rovers as well) they don't have enough power to transmit a signal all the way to earth, atleast not one that is strong enough to get data from. They transmit from mars to orbiters that then relay the signal back to earth. I would also assume that its because they'd rather pack on as much scientific devices as they could, rather than full motion video equipment. The difference between this one, and two resent rovers is that it has its 7foot arm thats going to dig, and see whats in/under the soil. It may not be very exciting, until they find some sorta bacteria, or even fossils, although to some thats not very exciting either, but to each their own. :)
Live DOOOOOOOOOOOOM
sorry, i had to...
I have been a bit bummed about space exploration lately though, seems like we haven't been out and about the galaxy as much as previously, definitely not the best of plans but americans dont seem willing to dump more money into a broken bureaucracy.
Definitely excited about the manned mission to mars and the space station on the moon venture, hope they are actually accomplished on time!
Sweet Action.
Don't forget the Decepticons.
We should travel to Mars II. Hidden behind Mars I. There are millions of undiscovered creatures there ready to reek some havoc!
The thing I don't get is how come they didn't put wheels on Phoenix? Are they not planning to use it for a long period? It's going to be just sat there in one spot. :(
And if it lands on the wrong spot, it'll be stuck there forever...
The "life" of this lander is only supposed to be a few months. After that, the Martian winter will hit it, blocking out the sun and slowly burying it under carbon dioxide frost.
So much effort for so little fun... :(
I'm sure if the scientists at NASA who've been working on this for several years would have put wheels on if they wanted to.
I don't know about you, but if I were a Martian, I'd be pretty excited when, as I shoveled my driveway, I found a multi-million dollar machine someone just left behind.
I like the way Xee put it, "The "life" of this lander is only supposed to be a few months. After that, the Martian winter will hit it, blocking out the sun and slowly burying it under carbon dioxide frost." It really sounds as though humanity has come a long way. From making stone wheels to putting an explorer on Mars only to blocked out by the same ol' CO2 we're fighting here.
"boring rock digging".
It's all boring until the rock digging turns up living extraterrestrial life-forms.
I'm in
I'm OK with no wheels. Some mission don't call for mobility. What I would love to see (hear) is an always on microphone than be accessed from a web browser...It would be cool to hear the silence and this thing whirring away.
Everytime I try to load the live video feed in either FF or IE it crashes. Nice!
heard on CNN yesterday that this only has a 53% chance of landing successfully. we'll see...
Maybe the Martians doesn't want any successful landing.
Well I heard on CNN yesterday that 73.59 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
And I heard that the other 26.41 percent of statistics are true 50 percent of the time.
I don't watch CNN.
I like it how they put ET instead of EST as a reference for eastern time.
*groans at awful 'set faces to stunned' pun*
I watched this launch last summer while working at the Kennedy Space Center. After traveling for 9 months at 20,000 km/hr it's about to land. Amazing! Let's home it makes it and we get some awesome pictures in the next hour or so.
by the time we actualy get a HUMAN to mars the robots will already controll the damn planet.
why cant we send some robots to the moon? i hear its made of cheese, someone should probaby check that out.
government cheese?
Yum Yum Give Me Some!
TouchDOWN!!!!
Now just a few more hours until the first pictures! :)
So thats where my taxes went. Another planet.
......sigh.....
i think most of your taxes blew up Iraq, etc...
Over 1 in 10 Americans live below the poverty line...
Low rank his comment in the name of science all you want, but should the country with the highest poverty rate in the developed world really be blasting rockets of money into mars/terrorists?
It cost the IRS $42 million to send out mail NOTIFICATIONS just to tell you your tax rebate was coming.
This entire mission, to another planet -- to possibly answer mysteries beyond your imagination -- cost $325 million.
Have another sandwich and look content, Aardvark.
Sadly and ironically, if it wasn't for missile research into ICBM's, DARPA would not have not begun research into redundant computer networking when they did. I have no doubt that the internet would eventually have come into existence, but Engadget might still be 5 years off into the future from now.
The UK has about the same poverty rate, and they've been much more socialist for 60+ years. There have always been and will always be poor people in every society. The difference between now and the past is that people aren't starving in America. Removing the profit motive for the most capable members of society to produce will only make the society collectively poorer, and the people at the bottom worse off.
Grow up.
It's times like this that I'm proud to be a stupid American...
I'm pretty much always proud to be an intelligent American; sorry you feel bad about being stupid though.
I really hope NASA doesn't use non-metric measurements...
..they're intelligent, they probably don't- I'm not going to worry about it.
Stupidity is a... series of tubes --I mean choices. It's a series of choices.
And the winner of today's Mars-ionapolis 50,000,000... Phoenix! (His secret? Two fold: 1. Cool American Gladiatoresque 'handle'. 2. NO pit stops!
Fire a speeding bullet from Florida 8 months ago aimed at a precise point on another world, have it autonomously deploy a heat shield as it crashes into the atmosphere at 13,000 mph, deploy a parachute at mach 1.7, kick away the heatshield, then use radar to then fire 12 thrusters to ultimately touchdown and kickoff a science mission that could find signs of life beyond our sky....yeah, that's pretty much my definition of what to do with a mere fraction of my tax dollars.
Godspeed NASA.
All that and you mentioned God, FAILS!
Touchdown!
Oh,Boy. What hell is that ouside my house
And for those of you for whom live-blogging it too slow, I give you the Mars Phoenix twitter stream:
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix
extremely cool that it landed so perfectly!
there's a live press event now: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
This is awesome news. Mars missions have an awful habit of disappearing without trace so its great to hear NASA's run of good missions (with help from luck) is so far still continuing.
The martians that witness this strange ship descending from outerspace will be re-assured by the Martian government that it was just a weather balloon reflecting light or gas from the Sun during military training exercises.