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.

We’re just finishing up four days of having the whole HiRISE team visiting us here in Tucson. It’s been a great team meeting! We had updates on operations, and heard a lot about science results from HiRISE images. Some CRISM and THEMIS team members participated, too, so we got to see what other teams are doing and talk about collaborating and using multiple data sets. People are doing really exciting things with HiRISE data!

Also, our team is really growing!

You’ll notice a lot of new faces compared to a few years ago!

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Tomorrow marks the beginning of the third two-week cycle in the primary mission. However, it’s only my first cycle! One Targeting Specialist is assigned to each cycle, and I’m on for cycle 3. Because we spend almost four weeks planning before the cycle even starts, there are three Targeting Specialists overlapping at any one time, in various stages of the planning process. Plus there’s a backup — HiBUTS, which stands for HiRISE BackUp Targeting Specialist. (I can’t take credit for that — that’s one of HiKu’s!)

Since before PSP started, we’ve all been working long hours. We haven’t had much time to blog, but right now I’m just waiting nervously for my commands to be radiated, so I thought I’d share this recipe. For all you faithful blog readers out there (all 2 of you? ), here’s my secret to surviving long workdays and cold nights:

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