Mars Phoenix lander to touch down on the red planet tonight

Suit up, space nerds, because the Phoenix lander is mere hours away from touchdown on Mars, and NASA's blowing this thing out. Not only will you get a live video feed from their site, but apparently Mission Control ops will be liveblogging the touchdown and ensuing alien encounters / totally boring rock digging. Festivities kick off at about 6:00pm ET, prepare to set faces to stunned.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Read - Phoenix mission page
Read - NASA live video feed
Read - NASA Mission Control liveblog

[ethana2 Posted May 26th 2008 1:01AM]

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.

[StemSell Posted May 25th 2008 9:03PM]

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!

[PhineasJW Posted May 25th 2008 9:24PM]

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.

[(Unverified) Posted May 26th 2008 5:06AM]

All that and you mentioned God, FAILS!

[(Unverified) Posted May 25th 2008 9:24PM]

nope!

[(Unverified) Posted May 25th 2008 9:38PM]

Touchdown!

[(Unverified) Posted May 25th 2008 11:26PM]

Oh,Boy. What hell is that ouside my house

[OctaneZ Posted May 25th 2008 11:39PM]

And for those of you for whom live-blogging it too slow, I give you the Mars Phoenix twitter stream:
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

[zx3junglist Posted May 26th 2008 12:49AM]

extremely cool that it landed so perfectly!
there's a live press event now: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

[ethana2 Posted May 26th 2008 12:58AM]

They'll call it 'the red screen of death'.

[DrXym Posted May 26th 2008 10:14AM]

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.

[MrBoJangles Posted May 27th 2008 12:50PM]

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.