May 27, 2008 10:58 AM

Watching Phoenix Land from 310 Km/193 Miles Up

Today the University of Arizona, who manages the HiRISE camera for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, released a stunning image of the Phoenix lander hanging from its parachute, diving past a huge crater. (You have to click on it to see it full size to really appreciate it). It is a higher resolution picture then the one that was released yesterday and it is a wider field of view which allows you to see the magnificent crater as well. The caption (after the jump) notes that you can even make out details in the parachute canopy. (Don't worry the lander missed the crater by about 20 km.)

The lower res image NASA released yesterday was the first time a Mars mission had ever imaged another Mars mission while it was in its final entry, descent and landing phase (EDL). It is truly a very cool piece of handiwork on the part of the HiRISE camera folks. They had to orient the whole spacecraft so that it could shoot back towards the lander at a very oblique angle as it was about to orbit around the back side of Mars away from the landing site.

MRO's HiRISE camera acquired this dramatic oblique image of Phoenix descending on its parachute. Shown here is a a wider view of the full image, showing a 10-km diameter crater informally called "Heimdall", and an improved full-resolution image of the parachute and lander. Although it appears that Phoenix is descending into the crater, it is actually about 20 km in front of the crater. It is difficult to believe that it is in front of the crater because it is so much smaller, but it really is, and that's a good thing because landing on the steep rocky slopes of the crater would have been far too exciting (or risky). Images from the lander clearly show that it sits on a flat plain, although the rim of Heimdall may be visible on the horizon. Given the position and pointing angle of MRO, Phoenix should be at the position shown here when it was between 8 and 10 km above the surface, just a few seconds after the parachute opened [at 12 km]. This improved image shows some details of the parachute, including the gap between upper and lower sections.

All I know is that this is very, very cool. But even better is the humans behind it all and their excitement and fears as they try things that have never been done before. Here is an except from the HiRISE blog on Monday May 26th:

When I left last night, we hadn’t gotten down the channel that included the parachute. The rest of the image is pretty low signal (and it’s a HUGE image), so we were searching through it for hours, trying to separate out cosmic ray hits and bright patches of ice. They had only given us a ~20% chance of getting it in our field of view, so I thought we had missed it. I finally went to bed feeling pretty frustrated, but woke up to find that, overnight we received additional channels of the image, and Richard Leis and some others here at HiROC had found THIS!

The team then went on to image the lander, now settled on the Martian surface:

Here is the "after" image of where the parachute (lower right- white) and lander (upper left- white dot with two black round solar panels on each side) ended up and the "bounce" mark where the heat shield (which would have fallen from 10 km) hit the ground (upper right- double black bounce mark). This was taken at landing +11 hours. The team may also release a landing +22 hours shot as well. (It takes the orbiter a while to go all the way around Mars and get positioned back over Phoenix to do all of this).