Phoenix Mars Lander To Touch Down In 2 Hours

AFP has a good summary of the pre-touchdown jitters the Phoenix Mars Lander crew is living through. The spacecraft has been under way for 10 months. If the landing goes according to plan — and only about half of the three dozen such attempts have — mission controllers at the University of Arizona will receive radio signals from the Martian surface at 23:53 GMT. Here's the Mars mission home. You can (in theory) track the lander here, but at the moment the JPL Solar System Simulator is "experiencing technical difficulties."

Comments

geeky video here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/phoenix/phx20080327/

Re:Buddy's Idea

[schnikies79]

Alderaan comes to mind.

no photos, planet not available at this time

[spazdor]

Way to go guys, we slashdotted Mars!

Re:no photos, planet not available at this time

[LostCluster]

I think the interplanetary cable got severed when it got run through the Sun.

I wonder

[Daimanta]

Is that Imperial hours or metric hours?

Re:I wonder

[Tango42]

Oh, I have no doubt it will land - Newton hasn't failed us yet. I'm just concerned about how many pieces it will be in afterwards...

(I say that - what do you think the odds are of them missing Mars entirely? That would be pretty impressive, especially at this late stage...)

Re:I wonder

[Kjella]

(I say that - what do you think the odds are of them missing Mars entirely? That would be pretty impressive, especially at this late stage...) Well from what I've understood you don't want to hit a planet dead on, you actually aim for the edge so you have a long burn "sideways" in the athmosphere to slow you down. There's actually a fairly small approach angle, come in too steep and you'll hit the ground at too high speed, but come in too flat and you'll bounce off the athmosphere and continue out into space again. So it's not quite so unlikely as you might think, not that I have any odds to give you but with a thruster malfunction in early stages of decent it can happen.

A better link for full JPL/Phoenix coverage

[Mc_Anthony]

Hello from JPL...

Best place to go for coverage including links to NASA TV (live video starts at 3:30pm PDT is... http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/phoenix.

Wish us luck!

Re:A better link for full JPL/Phoenix coverage

[CopaceticOpus]

The broadcast feels like a mix between a science lecture and coverage of a sporting event, which is pretty neat. As in sports, I'm cheering on the efforts of supremely talented people to score a goal. Rather than a football in an end zone, it's a lander on the northern plains of Mars. The difference here is that victory will actually mean something for mankind.

Go Earth! Get those Martians!

Thing to note

[Auckerman]

Nasa has pointed out to news agencies that only 5 of the 13 previous landings have been successful. Odds are, as always, this is not going to work. As slow as this science goes, taking several years from start of the project to a result, that a whole lot of pressure. The two most dangerous parts of this trip are the take off and landing. It's "easy" to adjust the craft when it's moving over 10 months in space, here we have a 7 minute fall from 12,000 mph to 5 mph. A LOT can go wrong.

Here's to hoping we learn something about Mars again. If not, as always, we need to keep trying. If it weren't for these people, things we take for granted in daily life wouldn't exist.

Re:Thing to note

[Tablizer]

Nasa has pointed out to news agencies that only 5 of the 13 previous landings have been successful. Odds are, as always, this is not going to work.

The vast majority of US *landing* attempts have been successful. In fact, only the Mars Polar Lander failed. That's one. And this craft has been heavily tested to avoid the same fate (because its using similar technology as the Polar Lander).

Direct Links to NASA TV

[Graftweed]

I ran into problems getting the NASA TV streams to work under Firefox in Linux. Here are the direct links if you're in the same boat or don't want to go through javascript infested pages. I only tested the Windows Media one.

Windows Media

Real Media

Quicktime

Re:Buddy's Idea

[Kjella]

I was thinking a smoldering crateer, but clearly your imagination has a bigger special effects budget.

Re:Buddy's Idea

[Spikeles]

Here's some light reading for you..
TCP Extensions for Space Communications
TCP/IP Router for Space Applications

Landing successful

[the_other_chewey]

It just touched down - and survived.

(Yeah, I know, 15min ago, gimme some lag ;-)