The Phoenix Has Landed

Last night got sorta late. I'm not going to say that nothing can keep me up as late as 3AM; that would have been a lie, but this one time I was glued to the computer screen watching a live NASA webcast of the Phoenix Mars Lander during its last hour or so before touchdown, and the first while just after. With only 5 of the last 11 Mars landings gone well, it was going to be a game of odds not entirely in our favour. It was a great relief when everything went not just as expected, but in fact even better. Phoenix is presently alive and well, having sent back the first images of Martian landscape.

What's Phoenix going to do? Aside from photographing rocks and pebbles, along with innocently unexpecting passing Martians, it will dig for water, or more precisely ice. Read up on Phoenix on the NASA site.

Last time I watched a landing of a man-made spacecraft on another piece of rock in the sky I was in diapers, one week shy of three months old, back in 1969. Of course the Eagle had people in it, but I don't think I was able to tell the difference at the time. In more recent times I've read about landings in the paper the next day, or heard about it on the next news broadcast. Watching it live is something entirely different.