Maybe that is it. I looked up a Oppy heatshield impact and indeed I do see some dark material deposited...

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050209.html

It's not completely reflective from the inside, quite dark apparently. There's a certain area covered in metal foil:
Click to view attachment

Judging by this, the shield impacted front end first, bounced and turned around with the front end looking up.

For comparison, Spirit's from the ground and orbit.

That huge crater on the HiRise image, where is it on the map?

Heimdall is the "large crater to the right" on this image. It's here on Google Mars.

I think it has to be the huge crater to the right (east) of the landing elipse

Very nice to see your mosaic Doug. It's amazing how much more easily this can be made (and shared) today compared with when I did it with Viking imagery back in 1976-77 at JPL. One question though, do you have any means of geometrically correcting the camera images or is this slightly more approximate? Perhaps the curved edges on some of the available images indicates they are converted to a cylindrical projection?

Steve

wow, more amazing stuff from hirise! it seems phoenix affected quite an area surrounded it. but I assume this is only the top few mm. Is that right? I didn't see the press briefing.

I just totally guessed it from the Polar projections on the Phoenix website - Photoshop distorted back to rectangular, and then reduced the height by about 3/4s. About as scientific as measuring the distance from the earth to the moon with a ruler.

Doug

So HIRISE must have taken TWO separate images of Phoenix on the chute?

In the first one released, with the dark background, the chute is to the upper RIGHT of the lander, while in the big picture taken against the crater Heimdall, the chute is to the UPPER LEFT of the lander.

Unless they twisted round one of images, for some reason ? Are they both from the same image?

One is a mirror of the other. In the rush to get it ready for press, they probably didn't get time to properly process, or they didn't compensate for some obscurity due to the weird imaging plan involved.

They are both from the same image. The one with the crater was rotated so it is more aesthetic, with the crater walls more or less perpendicular.

I arrived in late… But, what a GREAT picture from Hirise!!! Incredible, in can't believe my eyes.

As I understand it, the chute image was taken with HiRISE at a very high angle. Maybe they should do that more often to make these dramatic images

One data point on media coverage: I can't decide if this is good or bad news though. This story filled the entire front page of the Independent, and there's a very positive leader (editorial) as well:


I got my souvenir copy :/ A couple of the other broadsheets had it as a single column, below-the-fold item... and that was it.

Fantastic new images!

If anyone's interested in identifying objects around Phoenix in HiRISE images, here is an earlier image (PSP_002328_2485) which includes the confirmed landing point. The exact location of the landing spot in the full map-projected image is P 18600, L 12000.

A north-up crop from the old image, with labels pointing to their right to the known locations of hardware.

HiRISE usually points downward. For this image, the pointing was at 62 degrees, nearly two-thirds of the way from straight down to horizontal.

Thanks, Guy, that settles that.
A year or two ago this might have snowballed into a grand debate between schools of thought: the 2-shotters vs the Mirror-Imagers - complete with mascots, slogans and principal spokespersons. It was good, clean fun, but used a lot of bandwidth. Now GuyMac logs on, types 2 authoritative sentences, and we move on to other topics of interest!
The ratio of researchers to wannabes at UMSF seems to have soared in recent months. That leaves a lot of us with little to do but listen and learn, but results in a professional/amateur educational melange that must be pretty unique in the scientific realm.

Ya gotta love it.

So now we know why Phoenix drifted so far East.

It was -- perhaps in a hastily-hatched conspiracy with HiRise -- angling to line up in front of Heimdall crater, so that we could have that absolutely stunning picture. Question is, were any of the humans in on it?

Anyone want to take bets on how many major news pubs put it on their cover and/or front page above the fold?

I'm wondering if there will be released a full frame jp2 file of the picture with crater and Phoenix EDL

I noticed that in the color picture HiRISE took (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/230842m..._Lander-str.jpg), the area around phoenix is darker. This area is about circular, circa 7 times Phoenix's lenght in diameter.

Is this due to the thrusters? It seems to be a larger area affected, compared to the ground images (there was the discussion about the "dusty" rocks). Can this be seen in earlier HiRISE images from before the landing?

Mars really is a human place now isn't it? Three surface outposts, three orbiters, orbiters imaging each other, orbiters imaging landers both in descent and on the surface. Seems like it's an extension of Earth, our rust red world next door. So different in feeling from the long empty gap before Pathfinder and all that followed.

Edit: That said, the Heimdall crater + Phoenix image still gives a startling sense of perspective- huge, alien crater and a tiny fragile human machine heading into the unknown... we've barely begun to explore this place.

Hey, what happened to the units?
I hope they post an updated weather graphic on the web site somewhere.. be neat to follow the data daily
jb
EDIT: Looks like they have added it too the main mars page and have one on the CSA web site as well.

Is the next data relay likely to be about the same time as last nights?

oops

Just to keep the good ol' days with us in spirit, I will also (in addition to the machine conspiracy I unmasked above) suggest that it was the 'rabbit' from the Spirit landing site, on it's annual migration, which pushed that rock away from Phoenix at an angle.

OK, now that I've got that off my chest, I will stand down and assume a proper scientific attitude

...and we can see that one of the rovers already drove by Phoenix

it is a 10 kilometer (6 mile) diameter crater informally called "Heimdall"
That is an impressible picture and I thought that Phoenix was about to land inside
of crater but it was about 20 kilometer behind of the crater. Inside of crater is
covered by dioxide carbon or ice by its bright color.

REDIT: :Indeed yes it is much bigger if we compare ones' Victoria where Opportunity is living...

Question : is "Heimdall" already visible in the part of the pano we have or is it in the still missing part?

Does anyone know where the name 'Heimdall' comes from?

Visit here for details

OK, so after drooling over the Heimdall picture, I got to wondering, "Where's the ice?" Shouldn't we see some effect of the ice layers in the walls of that crater? It's ~12x as large as Victoria, btw.

Are those white specs on the right slope bits of ice?

One of the scoreboards for me is how many locations on the surface we've seen. Which is now, broadly speaking, at six, although the MERs expand that in a way that's hard to describe with integer math. I suppose you could say Spirit has given us two views -- from its landing site and from the hills -- and Opportunity has given us two -- from the plains and into craters -- and count it as eight.

Looking at my MER-based topographical globe, though, I note that all of our landing sites are in the blue and the green -- low altitude areas. And we know of the fascinating layered terrains in valleys and craters that have yet to be seen from the surface. I look at the rugged areas in the highlands and around Solis Planum and many others and wonder what those will look like from up close. Imagine if in terrestrial geology we'd only seen Ukraine, Kansas, and other places like that, while Utah, the Andes, the Himalaya, etc., were all unseen.

Tim, if you're reading this, can you report the exact lat/lon coordinates of the landing site? I tried to ask here in the press room and they got me someone to talk to who was telling me how important it was for this mission that they landed at an Alaska-like latitude rather than a Florida-like latitude Not quite the level of detail I was hoping for...

--Emily

Wouldn't there be new layers, deposited since the crater formed, hiding whatever it revealed on impact?

A question for all: what's the scale on the HiRISE image of the landing site? They don't report it on their website. It can be calculated by measuring the lander -- was hoping I wouldn't have to take the time

--Emily

Regarding the HiRise picture of the back shell and parachute, it seams to me that the backsell hit the ground North of the actual position (dark patch) while the heat shield hit SW of the actual position. Could it means that the chutte (so, the wind) dragged the backsell to the actual position? Does anybody see the same?

Thanks for this, marswiggle! Here's a "before and after" animated gif of the lander location, with only a quick and dirty attempt at rescaling/rotating the images to match:
Click to view attachment

Emily, my calculations based on span of the solar arrays and known dimensions (5.5 m) give me a pixel scale of about 0.35-0.40 m/pix. It would help if someone could remember the distances reported at the press briefing to the parachute and heatshield.

My chips are on... (Edit: Tim has my chips now.)

Thanks Fred! That really helps show the effect of the thrusters on the terrain. It looks like virgin unaltered surface (on the surface) is a little too far from the lander for the arm.

Also might expect that whatever we see in the very, very close vicinity of the lander had to survive the whoosh. So it should have a higher concentration of coarser grains, with the lighter dust settling on top of it (compared to virgin terrain).

-Mike

It does look that way. My guess is that this due to horizontal motion as it hit (which might be due to wind), not dragging by wind after the fact.

On the communication issues:
Not mentioned in the press conference, but AFAIK Mars Express also has rely capability, as a backup backup

What makes me hopeful is that there's also such a big splash around the backshell. The boundary of the discoloration may signify the disturbance of a VERY thin and superficial layer of dust, which isn't what Phoenix means to study, anyway. So we may see that everything more than 1 cm down or so is still pretty virgin.

And if the soil is somewhat sticky (e.g. similar to ordinary regolith), it may even be less than 1 cm. It could be that just the finest of dust grains were picked up by the exhaust. Any fine dust deeper in (immediately below the surface) would be shielded by larger grains.

A probably-naive question(s): why would the effect of the thrusters be to darken, rather than lighten, the surface? Does it confirm there's little or no ice in the upper layer of more firmly consolidated regolith, immediately below the 10-20mm superficial dust on the surface, or is it just down to the grain size? (I believe very small thin films of ice on sand-sized grains don't necessarily lighten the appearance at HiRISE resolutions?)

There might also be a bit of sorting of the smaller pebbles and grains (visible on the surface).

You might be able to look further from the lander to determine the effect, but this will be confounded by the natural sorting that occurs on polygonal terrain.

Vertical mobility, dig it!

Imipak, I believe it's the same reason why dust devils leave dark streaks. Notice the backshell also has darker soil around it and it had no engines.

Ah yes, of course - thanks!

Surface
-----------
Fine Dust
-----------

Basaltic
Sandy
Soil

----------


Icey Soil


---------

Ice-T



Maybe....just guessing

False color image I made of the HiRISE Phoenix lander image:

Click to view attachment

Dark blue shows the extent of the thruster (or impact whump) effect.

-Mike

Nice false color. Definitely suggests that the dark splotch around Phoenix is due to removal of the dust top layer rather than a chemical change.