No idea what the azimuth of 334 is but the twin bumps almost look like a crater on the horizon. Extreme enlargement of the white feature brings lots of artifacting but it sure looks odd - the backshell I guess???

P

Hopefully there will be a place to access the raw images... that flash interface is pretty awful. Half the time (more?) I click on an image and get nothing. I suppose this could be due to the heavy usage at the moment. Really need images with useful titles.

Now that we are safe on Mars, and the late night quietly lingers, this is the music that comes to my mind,
as I watch these pictures from this desolate beautiful barren landscape.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHTFmJk7fH0

A nice lullaby for all of us that, now the images have arrived, are going to bed for a well deserved rest

Sleep well Pheonix

The same to me. The flash copy only works when the picture has enough illumination. The ones dark, aren't showed up.

Absolutely beautiful!

It looks like the terrain they landed in is nice and uniform. Representatives of all the elements that they see (so far) stretching out to the horizon ad infinitum should oughta be within the work volume.

Congratulations for a perfect landing, and massive thanks for getting the images put up on the web so quickly!

It's a total rush to have the near instant gratification of EDL and the first pictues post-landing within a few hours.

Perfect!

Those images that look mostly black with a tiny bit of white - auto mosaics! How about that.

Yeah, except the server's having problems now that people are trying to download them!

Fascinating and spectacular. Look at the texture of the pyramid shaped rock at half-way up to the left of the pad. Are those tiny pyramid shapes on the upper, sunlit plane part of the surface of the rock, or fragments that have frozen to the parent? If the former, that'll be what CO2 frost exfoliation looks like, will it?

Had the nutty idea that that white thing might be penitent ice - but thats probably very silly so I'll shut up and enjoy the view. A quiet landscape FULL of interest, and probably surprises when we get a 360 pan! Congrats to all!

p

Very very very very very very very approximative false color pic from 2 pic (IR and blue filters?).

And a more "natural" touss tous pic :

So, time to go bed .

You might look at the MRO pictures of the area for colors. All of the phoenix landing pictures look pretty much the same, and there are plenty of color images.

Well there's sort of a start here - at least the images have the correct filenames. Unfortunately they seem to be following the Cassini model for their web-based image releases, technically speaking. But let's not complain (yet), it's a magic night.

O.K. Put the peanuts back in the cupboard, and let's do science!

This surface has accumulated a lot of rubble. It's poorly sorted and angular. I assume most of it is distal impact ejecta (where is the nearest young crater?), with a small proportion of meteorites. This probably wouldn't have landed here overnight. Ergo, this is not a very young surface. The rubble reminds me of the exposures north of Victoria Crater down in the spaces between dunes. So what's happening here? Rockhounds?

Edit: So does Alan get credit for the first UMSF processed image (the 3D) from Phoenix Station? Bravo!

The landing site location is being reported (per Emily) as 68.22 north, 234.3 east, and they're calling it long, but it seems to be almost smack dab in the middle of the landing ellipse in Emily's map.

I have reason to suspect those landing figures are a bit off. It seems slightly more to the north, and alot more to the east. 68.5N 233.3 E is what I've seen.


(Correction, I've seen better numbers, that match much better the numbers Emily provided. Still, it is off of on the left side of the landing ellipse in http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001431/ )

I dunno. I mentioned mine dumps on another thread, and they sure look like this in Butte, MT: no coherent pattern in rock shapes, lots of deposition of same on or near frost heave lines (it gets VERY cold there in the winter, and unexpectedly warm in the summer). I'd say that a lot of the rocks we see are being excavated by frost heaves over time.

It's been pointed out to me on another forum that there's a more up-to-date landing ellipse, and that the location is indeed long on this ellipse. (Maybe they should have stuck with the old one!)

Anybody have any ideas as to why the background behind one of the solar arrays appears to be completely black? Nothing, including the sky, ought to be completely black up there right now...

-the other Doug

It's just because they're shooting more or less into the low polar sun, and the bright sky is reflecting in the arrays and so they used a very short exposure.

It's not completely black (I'm assuming you mean image SOL0 281477120), but rather, very dark. I'm guessing that the surface there has a big spacecraft between it and the sun, causing it to be very dark.

Yeah, my only thought was that it must be looking past the solar panel into Phoenix's own shadow. But I downloaded the picture and blew it up, and saw no detail in the black area at all, which I didn't expect.

Still -- lots of reflected light plus the shadow is the only explanation that makes sense, I think.

-the other Doug

Besides being a powered landing, one might note another similarity with Viking 2, that being polygonal terrain. A quick check shows this reference that delves into the causes of this in the case of Viking. Mostly it's more the larger scale polygons that are discussed however.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/7thmars2007/pdf/3322.pdf

It seems the lander site-scale polygons may share a similar ice related cause at both sites, while the large-scale polygons at Utopia Planitia would have a different cause.

Steve

Which image are you referring to? Just want to make sure we are talking about the same thing.

This is one of them, tuvas:

solar panel

-the other Doug

Odd... I clearly see quite a few rocks in the image, although very dark...

The last press briefing of the day, which I had thought was scheduled for 4:30am UT, seems to have been moved back up to 4am UT (9pm PDT, 11pm my time, CDT, and 12 midnight EDT). About eight minutes from now.

-the other Doug

Might just be my tired old eyes, LOL... I looked hard and saw nothing in the background.

Ought to load it up in something that lets me tweak up brightness and contrast.

-the other Doug

nick,
the rubble on the ground 'reminds' me of the uncountable rocks that surface in my garden every spring as the freezing and thawing pushes them up to the surface (New England)

Yep -- just loaded up that solar panel image in a quick-and-dirty tool that let me boost the brightness, and sure enough, a little field of pebbles appeared in the background.

-the other Doug

Oh good. I guess I have my brightness set well enough on my computer.

Nice shot of Emily in the audience of the Presser

You beat me to that by about a minute there, Dan. She looked tired but happy.

-the other Doug

I'm enjoying the first quick-and-dirty color image from Phoenix by Emily posted on TPS blog. Thank you for all your hard work.

I just remembered that my name is on that lander.

Forgot about that, thanks planetary society!

Precisely; I'm gonna go out on a limb & propose that the same mechanism is at work here.

Dan: Yeah, saw Emily out there; man, she really did right by us!!! Truly aces in my book, and should be so for every other UMSFer.

The streaming feed from NASA TV went crappy over the last few minutes, missing damn near all the Q&A here.

Click to view attachment

I'm capturing it on my sat box. Remind me later and I'll try and make a copy for you if they don't archive it.

Great work n1ck. That white object cannot be natural.

I did catch that question in the presser; nobody wants to hazard a guess about that thing yet. Understandable...but, yeah, gotta be EDL hardware, obviously.

In fact, the 'lens flare' is almost identical to the spec reflection that Oppy's backshell produced at certain angles, and IIRC Phoenix uses identical CCDs. That's pretty much a smoking gun.

PSP_002249_2485 is centered almost perfectly on the 68.22 lat, 234.3 lon location given in the press conference.

I'm going with Dr. Griffin on that one. Clearly a polar bear.

...he's gonna have to walk a LONG way before he finds a seal, then!

Some colour shots posted on the spaceflightnow site:
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/phoenix/images/color1.jpg
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/phoenix/images/color2.jpg

PSP_006996_2480 may also cover the landing area

When is Tesheiner going to start a Phoenix Route Map???

LOL &

woohoo! amazing stuff! looking forward to the days to come

The seals are under the ice.

Congrats to all at JPL and the University of Arizona...
A great job by UMSF.com with a server ready for this occasion!

Congratulations Phoenix and JPL! Great landing and a great experience last night.

Never seen UMSF with so many users!