The Phoenix has Landed.

I don’t know if anybody has been following the MarsPhoenix mission, but it’s incredible! The whole thing is super fascinating to me. I’ve been following its progress from the day it touched down on Mars. This is seriously cool stuff. Now I’m not holding my breath for microbial life forms, not that interesting if you ask me. I am however intoxicated with the idea that this robot that we built is somewhere nothing has been before. Sure there are places on the Earth that have never been explored, but this is another planet. You don’t get much more “out there” than that. Every time I look at the pictures that MarsPhoenix sends back it makes me think “Wow, no one has seen this before. That little rock right there, never seen by a human being until right now.” Pretty cool stuff. It’s gotten me all whipped up into an existential fit. I’ve included a few photos below. Also check out this cool site for updates http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix. It is a micro-blog site that the Phoenix team set up to let the public track the progress of the Phoenix lander. The team writes the blog in the first person, like the lander is actually answering questions and giving updates. I can almost see Wall-E answering the questions.

This picture almost reminds me of that teaser for Transformers. Any minute now a huge robot is going to pick up the lander and all we'll see is static. That is until Shai Le Beouf goes to buy a new car, or so he thinks....

See that big flat rock toward the top of the screen? I stared at that thing for a good ten minutes when I first saw this picture. It was a total "Pink Floyd German disco Laser Show" experience. Ground that has never been touched by anything man-made until now.

This image is supposed to show some interesting shapes in the ground indicating periods of thaw and freezing. I just think it's rad because you can see all the way to a horizon and past that horizon is another "undiscovered country".

This is an image of the MarsPhoenix lander as it descends to the surface of Mars. The white things are the parachutes and the fleck of blue is MarsPhoenix. This is so cool.