The Phoenix Has Landed

Iddo Genuth writes "Precisely at 7:53PM EST, the "Phoenix Mars Lander" touched-down on the desert-like surface of Mars. Since its launch on August 4th, 2007, the spacecraft has covered more than 680,752,512 kilometers, traveling at average speeds of around 120,000 km/hr. Upon arriving at its destination, the Phoenix will begin its exploration of our intriguing neighbor planet, in a mission to help astronomers resolve at least some of the many questions regarding Mars. The key question remains: can the Red Planet support some form of life?" Hella grats to our nerd brethren — you looked great on the Science channel. Yes I'm watching this live. Can't wait to see what happens next.
Update: 05/26 03:0 GMT by KD : zof sends a link to the first pictures from Phoenix.

Comments

Re:live

[rninne]

"Hey! Aren't you Neil Armstrong? I just saw you on the moon." "uhhh... The tape delay and err solar winds..." Any way enough Family guy, In other news http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/23/1723208

Re:Doesn't even have to be live life...

[AKAImBatman]

Easier or not, JUST ONCE I'd like to see a few images from cheap color cameras just so we could put the "Is the sky ever blue or always putrid yellow?" question to rest. Both sides have made pretty good arguments, so the question was never really settled. As long as NASA continues to composite color images using non-visible lighting to "fill in" for the visible spectrum, there will always be a question.

Sometimes I think NASA forgets the human aspect of what they're doing. The science is good, but some folks just want to know if the sky is blue. Heck, I could see a television network getting huge ratings out of the "reality show" aspect of following a few astronauts around the moon with a handicam. At the very least, the general public would get to share the sensation (however abstracted) of what it's like to actually be there. That's an aspect that hasn't been considered in this race for the latest spectrographic results from a pile of rocks.