First images from the Phoenix Martian Lander

The Phoenix Mission image gallery.

This was the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on Mars with thrusters in 32 years.

At 8:30 a.m. PDT Sunday, the spacecraft was approaching Mars at 6,300 miles an hour; by 12:30 p.m. its velocity had increased to 8,500 miles an hour under the tug of the planet's gravity. By 4:30 p.m. that speed had reached 12,700 mph - the spacecraft's fastest before its final approach. That final approach to the surface was a scheduled hair-raiser in every respect - but the signals from Phoenix before those last seven minutes had shown that all was well.

At 4:24 p.m. the spacecraft itself - the vehicle's cruise stage that had carried it all the way from Earth - separated by firing pyrotechnics from the instrument-laden lander. Descending now at 12,700 mph, the spacecraft's ceramic heat shield flamed at 6,200 degrees Fahrenheit to burn away 99 percent of the speeding spacecraft's formidable energy in the tenuous but thickening Martian atmosphere. The heat shield was jettisoned by another pyrotechnic device automatically just 202 seconds before landing.

Then the spacecraft's red-and-white striped parachute deployed about 7.8 miles above the surface, slowing the lander's speed from 1,100 mph to a mere 120 mph in a little more than 3 minutes. At almost the same instant, 192 seconds before landing, the lander's three legs lowered automatically to form the tripod on which Phoenix and all its instruments are mounted.

Next, the lander's ground-seeking radar switched on, sending its signals aloft to Mars Odyssey, the orbiter flying directly overhead, and relaying Odyssey's signals to the antennae of NASA's Deep Space Network at Goldstone in the Mojave Desert, near Canberra, Australia, and Madrid. At landing time, Goldstone would catch the signals and send them instantly to Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And finally, 18 seconds before landing and with its parachute already detached, Phoenix was in free fall for a mere half-second 100 feet above the ground before its 12 retrorocket thrusters fired downward to slow the landing to a bare 5 mph - and as Goldstein had predicted earlier, "Phoenix would gracefully and slowly reach the ground." [...] Phoenix's 12 hydrazine-powered thrusters were needed because the spacecraft and its instruments weigh a total of 904 pounds atop its three legs.

So cool.