Parachute!
We caught it! 
MRO did a special imaging sequence to slew over to where the Phoenix spacecraft was plummeting down through the atmosphere, and it WORKED! I can’t believe what an engineering feat this was – the MRO spacecraft team’s pointing was right on, and Phoenix was exactly where they thought it would be.
When I left last night, we hadn’t gotten down the channel that included the parachute. The rest of the image is pretty low signal (and it’s a HUGE image), so we were searching through it for hours, trying to separate out cosmic ray hits and bright patches of ice. They had only given us a ~20% chance of getting it in our field of view, so I thought we had missed it. I finally went to bed feeling pretty frustrated, but woke up to find that, overnight we received additional channels of the image, and Richard Leis and some others here at HiROC had found THIS!
You can see the parachute itself, AND the lander encased in the heat shield dangling below it – AND you can see the STRINGS attaching them! This is the first time a spacecraft has ever been photographed as it descends through the atmosphere of another planet. Everyone here is incredibly excited about this image. 
However, we’re too busy poring over the image we took after this one to spend too much more time on this. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to show you the lander itself, on the surface!
Go, Phoenix!
NASA press release: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080526.html
May 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Simply fantastic!! Great job guys!
May 26th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
It appears that the pciture of the Phoenix parachute entry was taken while the “chute” was still partially reefed (still supersonic?). You can make out an inverted teardrop shape as opposed to the bowl shaped form of the fully deployed parachute. Any time stamp on when the pic was taken vs. entry timeline?………….Doc
May 26th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Fantastically fantastic! What a picture. You guys made history with that one – terrific job!
May 26th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I wonder how did the imaging team succeed in getting this unbelievable image when Phoenix was quite off its nominal target? Also, what was exposure time? I think Phoenix must have been moving pretty fast yet I detect no motion blur.
May 26th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I can’t believe you guys actually pulled it off… It is absolutely amazing what must have gone through to get this image… Good work guys!
May 27th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Truly incredible, I’m out of words for this. An absolutely mindblowing achievement! Congratulations everyone at HiROC!
May 27th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Absolutely SPECTACULAR! This has got to be one of the best planetary images this year if not this decade! Kudos to the team, nice to see all that planning paid off!
Looking forward to seeing the thing on the ground as well
May 27th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
It sounds pretty odd that you could get the STRINGS. How many strings are?, Which is the thickness of each one?. Anyway, CONGRATULATIONS. You’re the best…
May 27th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
in spanish please
May 27th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
En Español por favor
May 27th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
The time that Phoenix was captured was 2008-May-25 23:35:32.5 on MRO (spacecraft event time in UTC). According to SPICE, the Ephemeris Time was 23:36:37.6. We think this is ~5 seconds after the heat shield dropped off. It would be great to find out the exact speed and if it was supersonic!
May 28th, 2008 at 1:26 am
If it’s only 5 seconds after heat shield jettison, then conceivably also the shield should be detectable in the image as a dark splotch, no?
May 28th, 2008 at 3:46 am
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and using the Phoenix EDL HUD animation (pretty consistent with another source at heatshield sep), 5 seconds after jettison the lander would have a speed of about 85 m/s and the heat shield (neglecting air drag, I’m not sure how significant it was) up to 120-ish m/s. Adding up the math (there’s a slightly more elaborate post about that at UMSF) this gives a separation between the backshell and heatshield up to 90 meters. If the ballpark parachute cord length is 30 m (don’t know the exact figure), that could be used as a measure of how many pixels further down from the lander the heatshield could be in that magnificent HiRISE image with Heimdall crater backdrop. For the sake of argument let’s say it’s 3 times the cord length. That’s still well within relatively bright crater interior so a dark heatshield ought to be visible.
Did anyone from the HiRISE team try looking for the shield as well?
May 28th, 2008 at 4:34 am
[...] descenso sobre un planeta distinto a la Tierra; el equipo de la HiRISE lo cuenta emocionadísimo en Parachute! [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Great Job! Your perseverance really paid off!
May 28th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
The problem with finding the heat shield is that it is much darker than the lander, and so are alot of other objects. The parachuting lander is a highly unnatural shape. A heat shield isn’t quite so obvious…
May 30th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Genial trabajo, gracias.
June 4th, 2008 at 4:46 am
How did you know what size parachute to use based on the desity of the Mars atmosphere.
The project as a whole is some seriously clever stuff… how the hell did you know which direction(three dimensions) to point the telescope over some 56,000,000 kilometers to take a picture of Pheonix’s 7 Parachute descent. I just have to move my golf iron 1 degree over 180 yards and my balls in the rough.
Congratulations to you all…
June 4th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
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