Thanks to the Arizona HiRISE team! The full-res version is breathtaking…

A smaller version and back story are at WIRED:

“Today the University of Arizona, who manages the HiRISE camera for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, released a stunning image of the Phoenix lander hanging from its parachute, diving past a huge crater.

The lower res image NASA released yesterday was the first time a Mars mission had ever imaged another Mars mission while it was in its final entry, descent and landing phase (EDL). It is truly a very cool piece of handiwork on the part of the HiRISE camera folks. They had to orient the whole spacecraft so that it could shoot back towards the lander at a very oblique angle as it was about to orbit around the back side of Mars away from the landing site.”

16 responses to “Phoenix HiRISEing”

  1. ken mccown Avatar
    ken mccown

    wow, thanks for posting this! Strange to see "Phoenix" tagged next to the University of Arizona!

    Reply
  2. Happy Tinfoil Cat Avatar
    Happy Tinfoil Cat

    amazing!

    Reply
  3. A Tout Le Monde Avatar
    A Tout Le Monde

    Really brings a visual sense to the idea of hurling a refrigerator 422 million miles and landing it on a moving object. I thought that was difficult but imagine using another moving object to photograph the first moving object. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  4. Kevin Baird Avatar
    Kevin Baird

    I’m sure the crater was many miles beyond the descending lander, but it looks like they’re about to make the hole-in-one they were bragging about. 🙂

    Reply
  5. TomiTapio Avatar
    TomiTapio

    The little boggart is landing! Whee!

    Reply
  6. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    nah. i don’t believe it. these things are easily forged. *

    (mindblowing)

    Reply
  7. aeroculus Avatar
    aeroculus

    stunning!

    Reply
  8. Duncan Rawlinson - Duncan.co Avatar
    Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co

    did you see they now have a color photo of the lander on the ground?!

    Reply
  9. sbove Avatar
    sbove

    at first i thought this was a crazy balloonist crashing into crater national mnmt in AZ…

    the earthlings are coming…

    Reply
  10. Victor1 Avatar
    Victor1

    good find. kind of goes with ‘photographers shooting photographers.

    Reply
  11. avlxyz Avatar
    avlxyz

    wow… did the Phoenix actually land in the crater?

    Reply
  12. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    From the HiROC team:
    "Although it appears that Phoenix is descending into the crater, it is actually about 20 km in front of the crater. It is difficult to believe that it is in front of the crater because it is so much smaller, but it really is, and that’s a good thing because landing on the steep rocky slopes of the crater would have been far too exciting (or risky)."

    @Victor: metaphotos from Mars!

    @sbove: yeah, and the next lander will be blasting rocks with lasers! When Earth Attacks! Watch out for their defensive modalities and counterstrike…

    @biotron: Gotta be careful on the forgeries, ever since the smoking gun photo of the faked moon landing came out…

    Well, now you can say you saw the first photo of water on Mars:

    Reply
  13. aeroculus Avatar
    aeroculus

    great picture of water on mars.

    I used to do climate research and forecasting for Mars…sometimes when people asked what I did and my reply was ‘I build weather models for Mars’, they often did not know where to go next with that. sometimes I explained, other times I just would just keep silent and see if they could figure it out on their own. geek entertainment ; )

    Reply
  14. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    a classic exposé – and great riposte to any pirate-skeptics out there…

    In the Shadow of the Moon was on tv last week, which I first saw at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last year. Armstrong was conspicuous by his absence, and we spent quite a while pondering his choice to generally avoid all publicity, so it was interesting to revisit your Tang-farce page via the hoax-hoax link 🙂 forget those binary fuel-mixing dreams, i would like to have heard his opinion on Edgar Mitchell’s "interesting" career trajectory…

    have you seen the film? Michael Collins is absolutely priceless.

    Reply
  15. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Not yet… Must see. Meanwhile, here is a short video of Mars 2020

    Reply
  16. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    brilliant!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *