Hungry's GIF shadows say both ears have flopped!?

Perhaps the parachute is only buried under a new layer of dust; there has been significant dust activity in the NPR since late 2009 as seen by amateurs this apparition. The partially covered heat shield also supports this hypothesis. And because the parachute would lay flat as ices accumulated, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume the new layer of dust completely obscures its visibility after the ice sublimates.

"I think that the Vikings should be used for comparison here, and their parachutes were still visible, if I remember correctly "

But only just visible, for Viking 1, and only a guess for Viking 2. They are both pretty much dust-covered. Now that I think of it I'm not sure I ever saw a view of the Viking parachutes in the multispectral strips from HiRISE. That should help.

Phil

Phil,

Emily had a great photo comparison article of 'chutes and landers'

http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/ma...der_search.html

The Viking 2 parachute seems to have gone missing - it must be in the neighborhood though....

Cheers

A few extra details in the PIA caption.

Final Phoenix poem...

http://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/farewell-phoenix

I have also removed Phoenix from my Spacecraft on and around Mars webpage. At least on my website, Phoenix has now joined other "Martians" (MGS, Vikings & many more) as a historic timeline of a successful mission. After all, Phoenix started my realtime simulations website, and I'm glad it entertained ~4,000 visitors last month alone!

Just about 800 days to go to the Mars Science Lab / Curiosity landing ...

Santa didn't leave enough firewood.

Lemmon suggested in Emily's recent story on Phoenix that the parachute may have rotated around the backshell due to winds. Here's my best guess at an identification of the parachute in the new image (white arrows):
Click to view attachment
Pretty subtle, I know. It could easily be a coincidence of noise. I also wonder if there may be surface changes in the polygonal features after one Martian year? I don't recall what the timescale for change is thought to be.

Here is an image of Phoenix in Spring 2010 from HiRise with the 2009 after landing image pasted just below.
They are the same scale (more or less)
The Spring image has been super processed for contrast.

Click to view attachment

cheers