Most excellent sir

Thanks for this

I noticed the "Canada" logo and the Canadian flag. Cool, eh? Long overdue that we're on Mars!

Ever notice that this area of Mars's terrain looks alot like our Devon island in our far north.

First images and now...
Sound!

If you want to listen to a suitable soundtrack while viewing those breathtaking images of Phoenix from HiRise :

Listen to Phoenix descend

from ESA's Mars Express Lander Communication system (MELACOM)

Not images, but still interesting ...

Edit : I just noticed Rui beat me to it .. Well... Ultreya !

Ultreya to you too!
I must be fair I already knew that was going to be posted so I was just waiting for the stuff to come out...

from the ESA link:

"Unfortunately, the science observations carried out during the descent did not lead to the anticipated results. "

no fireball then...?

Never been that far North . . . I was at the Canadian Space Agency in St. Hubert as part as a Mars Society event and we heard both Canadian Scout proposals just before they were awarded. Very interesting! I guess that makes Canada's flag # 3 on Mars, (and second photographed since the Soviets never returned any imiagery other than static)

Good questions.

I've been thinking a lot about this since the HiRISE images of PHX came down. It's particularly interesting to note that the first HiRISE image of the lander, taken around 3am local time, doesn't show the backshell as an obvious feature at all.

It's going to hurt a lot, but I plan on looking over every single mother's son of those HiRISE images of the MPL search site (and probably the Beagle II coverage so far as well) to be sure I didn't miss it the first time around. Groan!


-Tim.

Taken with the lack of an expected LOS due to plasma I'm wondering is there was something interesting going on in the upper atmoshere? The review by the EDL team should be educational.

NASAWatch noted that too. With photographic support!

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/...vu_on_mars.html

That sound recording made from the Mars Express tracking data is nifty, but I don't understand the way that the signal's frequency is shifting. The caption to the signal animation reads
What I see in the animation is:
- at about 342 sec a spike appears at between 7 and 8 KHz.
- the spike moves to lower frequencies over time.
- shortly before 700 sec it reaches its lowest frequency, less than 1 KHz.
- then the spike moves to the right.
- The spike disappears at 1085 seconds, I guess with landing.

I don't understand why the frequency goes down, then up again. I would have assumed that the frequency would be highest at the beginning, with Mars Express approaching Phoenix, then when it passes its closest approach the frequency would have suddenly shifted down, as Mars Express draws away. Can someone explain to me why the frequency changes as it does?

--Emily

Shooting from the hip here, a combination of Doppler shift and differential rates of data transmission? Would make more sense if this is frequency-shift keyed.

Eric Hand from Nature is blogging the Phoenix landing. It's thoughtful, well written, and a good reference to give to people who want an informed account but may not have the patience for reading the enthusiast sites.

TTT

Tim, you sure are motivated... Even when I was looking for MGS, I could barely stand to look at the images in 2x2 binned format... And that was only 1 image... Not to mention no background except the black of space...

ALERT

Wednesday's Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing starting 2 p.m. EDT
That's about 15 minutes from now! I am posting this at about 1:45 EDT

2 p.m. - Mars Phoenix Lander Briefing - JPL/Tucson (Public and Media Channels)

NASA TV on the web

Audio Only (RealAudio)

Quicktime

Jack

Here's a higher bitrate WMV stream of NASA TV: http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163

It looks decent enough to display on my 56" HDTV!

That was a quick press conference. What happened ?

virtually no one had questions!!