Many people ask us if we are still imaging the Phoenix lander, and the answer is yes, as long as there is enough light. Here is our latest view of the landing site, acquired December 21, 2008. Conditions are hazy and dark because as the season approaches northern winter on Mars, the sun does not rise as high in the sky. Looks cold!
Many of you have sent us great feedback about the hundreds of cool anaglyphs we just released. And they are fascinating to see! Several people have asked the next reasonable question, “Where are the DEMs?” A DEM, if you don’t already know, is a digital elevation model. This is a product that can also be produced from a HiRISE stereo pair. HiRISE DEMs are awesome because they can model the terrain at a resolution of 1 meter per post! That means for every square meter of Mars visible in a HiRISE image (for which we have stereo) we can derive an elevation value. This provides the opportunities to measure geological features, model hydrology and spacecraft traverses.
We would love to be able to release a DEM for every HiRISE stereo pair, but alas, they don’t exist yet! We here at HiROC and a few other groups have made some DEMs, but only a small percentage of all the acquired stereo has been processed so far. Why?? Because creating a DEM is actually quite difficult, and requires specialized software and a fair amount of time.
But there is hope! So far, the USGS Astrogeology group has created several DEMs in support of the MSL landing site selection workshops, the Phoenix lander and the MER mission. They are available on the USGS website. Here is an example of one of their products:
Soon, we will begin preparing the DEMs we have made for release to the PDS Imaging Node. So stay tuned…
Phoenix has announced on its Twitter feed that it’s likely at the end of its mission. They haven’t heard from the lander in over a week at this point, and it’s not looking very hopeful that they’ll have enough power to do so in the next few weeks before we go into conjunction.
The last image we took of the lander shows it sitting pretty, just as it has been since May 25th. We’ll take another picture this week, and probably continue to monitor the site after conjunction to study how frost covers the area. Next spring, MRO will be listening to see if Phoenix wakes up and calls home, but the odds of that are exceedingly slim, despite its epithet (see this blog entry for more about why this is most likely the real end of the mission).
I didn’t think I’d be so sad! It has been an exciting and successful mission, and I’m glad I could be involved in a small part of it. RIP, Phoenix! …or, rather, one of the better-written epitaphs submitted in Wired’s contest to eulogize the mission. There are some great ones in that list – some clever, some heartwarming, and some just funny. Personally, I like Phoenix’s last tweet best:
01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3
(Unless you’re also a machine, you’ll probably need a binary converter like this one to get the message.)
Our latest release includes more products from the original Phoenix descent observation, which include the color CCDs hand-mosaicked over the red filter CCDs. We’ve also been working with the Phoenix and MRO engineering teams to identify the location of the heat shield in the image (left). It’s pretty incredible that we caught the lander just after releasing the heat shield – a few more seconds, and it would have been out of the scene.
Emily Lakdawalla continues her excellent blog coverage in this article, which does a great job of explaining some of the reasons why this image was especially difficult to take. Along the way, she includes a tutorial on TDI (Time-Delay-Integration), written by one of the engineers that helped build the instrument. TDI is the method HiRISE uses to gather lots of light into its CCDs, and it’s one of the reasons we get such high signal-to-noise in our images. It’s a complicated concept, but it’s an important one for understanding HiRISE’s incredible imaging abilities, as well as its limitations.
From her blog post:
This is a fascinating story showing how necessary it sometimes is to have a deep understanding of an instrument in order to understand the data that comes from it. …It can be dangerous to read too much into space images until you have studied how the cameras really work.
It’s a great post – she deserves a cookie! 
HiRISE imaged the Phoenix landing site 11 and 22 hours after touchdown. These have been used by the Phoenix team to determine their precise location and orientation on Mars. More details and images are on our main page.
Kudos to everyone who helped make this happen, from the navigation team at JPL delivering updated files, to our operations people who spent many long hours over the holiday weekend busily at work. And congratulations to the Phoenix team here in Tucson, who have embarked on what promises to be an exciting summer of science operations!
So it turns out that the descent of Phoenix is actually visible in the browse scale image. That’s the image which is reduced in scale by a factor of ten which eliminates a lot of noise. What’s more astounding is that directly line-of-sight in the background is giant Heimdall Crater! Yesterday’s image made everyone’s jaw drop but this one is mind-blowing. The tiny image below is linked to the browse scale image.
This oblique view has been rotated so the crater is facing up. Phoenix, caught in its Promethean act, is between 8 and 10 kilometers above the surface, descending in the foreground at a distance of approximately 20 kilometers from the crater. It’s landing site was ultimately beyond the crater’s ejecta blanket.
The inset is an enhanced version at full resolution, showing some details of the 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
We just saw on NASA TV that the first images came down – they look great! The solar panels are deployed, and you can see a bit of the surface with some small rocks. There’s also a really cool horizon image – you can see the polygons we’ve been imaging for years, right up close! — And from a very different perspective, of course! 
An overflow crowd of thousands were in rapt attention here on the University of Arizona campus, as they watched the NASA Television coverage of the successful Phoenix Landing. It has been really amazing to see so many people gathered in support of their mission. It was literally standing room only here at the Charles P. Sonett space sciences building that hosts HiROC. There was actually a line to get into the Kuiper space sciences building, and another one for the Flandrau planetarium, while another crowd gathered out on the university Mall, and possibly another group down at the campus bookstore. People began watching attentively at all of these locations starting around an hour before touchdown. Tucson really showed its support for Phoenix today. People actually took down (carefully!) a large hanging mural so they could watch the display from outside the glass window of our building. I could tell that things were going well by the occasional outbursts of applause.
When Peter Smith gave enthusiastic shout outs to the UofA community and to Arizona, the crowd erupted in responsive applause. Congratulations to the Phoenix team and especially to those working on EDL at JPL in Pasadena and Lockheed in Denver.
Join us this Sunday, May 25th from 3-8 PM on the University of Arizona campus for a celebration of the landing of our sister mission, Phoenix. The Kuiper building, Sonett lobby, (that’s where HiROC is located, and where we’ll be) and Flandrau planetarium will be open to the public. There will be speakers from the Phoenix and HiRISE teams, children’s activities, NASA TV running for live updates on the status of the lander, telescopes set up for viewing the sun, tours of the buildings, planetarium shows, and cake!
Detailed schedule of events:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/calendar/calendar.php?ID=107
We’ll be thinking of the Phoenix team during this critical step – we’ve got our fingers crossed, wishing you the best!
