O.T. NASA Hits Mars Bullseye

I always enjoy these explorations. I stayed up to watch the landing and
the engineers and others sweating the last 7 min's that must have been
somewhere unbearable for many of them.

May 26, 2008
NASA Hits Mars Bullseye

Rick Moran
In a jaw dropping feat of engineering and technical wizardry, NASA's
Phoenix Mars Lander touched down on the surface of the Red Planet at
7:53 EDT last night after a journey of 9 months and more than 440
million miles:

During the final, tense minutes of the descent, long stretches of quiet
in the mission support room were punctuated by cheers and clapping as
confirmation of crucial events like the deployment of the parachute were
confirmed.

Then, at 7:53 p.m. Eastern time, Richard Kornfeld, the lead
communications officer for entry, descent and landing, announced:
"Touchdown signal detected."

The mission controllers, wearing identical blue polo shirts made for the
occasion, erupted in cheers and began hugging one another in
congratulations.

"It was better than we could have possibly wished for," said Barry
Goldstein, the project manager for the mission. "We rehearsed over and
over again. We rehearsed all of the problems, and none of them occurred.
It was perfect, just the way we designed it."

At 9:53 p.m., there were more cheers as confirmation came that one more
critical event, the unfolding of the solar arrays, had occurred without
problem. And then the first pictures arrived: black-and-white images of
the solar panels, of one of the lander's footpads and of surrounding
terrain, showing the polygonal fractures caused by repeated thawing and
freezing.

The accuracy of landing exactly where they expected and wanted to is
unreal. It was explained as firing an arrow from the pitchers mound at
Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles and hitting home plate at Wrigley Field
in Chicago. But the course was so accurate that the scientists didn't
need to make a last course correction that was scheduled for yesterday
morning.

I wrote a background piece on the mission here.

They named the craft The Phoenix because the mission utilized elements
from the failed Mars Polar Lander that crash landed 9 years ago after
the rocket engines shut off prematurely due to a faulty sensor on the
landing bag.

The science that will be carried out on the surface of Mars by the
Phoenix will revolutionize our understanding of the history of Mars and
possibly even confirm that life existed on the Red Planet at some time
in the distant past.
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