25 May 2008
The hardest part of the Phoenix Mission is over. The lander is safely on the Martian surface, further north than any previous mission has ever gone. Pictures are making their way back to NASA and the University of Arizona.
The landing was "better than [NASA] could have possibly wished for" according to JPL Project Manager Barry Goldstein.
The landing model predicted a blackout of radio transmission due to plasma from the atmospheric deceleration. In reality the lander never lost contact with Mission Control. The lander ended up roughly a quarter of a degree off axis, which is extremely close to a perfect landing.
This mission was the first ever twittered by NASA. The live twittering, posted by a JPL employee, but written in the first person as the lander can be found here: http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix.
Photos broadcast from the lander are streaming in to the University of Arizona's Phoenix Lander site: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/
An hour after the landing some of the key people involved in the mission including associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate Ed Weiler, principal investigator from the University of Arizona Peter Smith, JPL project manager Barry Goldstein, Lockheed Martin spacecraft manager Ed Sedivy, and NASA's director of the Mars Exploration Program answered some questions about what went right during the Mission.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/mars/index.html
