A barren landing site is exactly what they were looking for, since it’s far easier to land on smooth ground than on a bunch of rocks. Phoenix landed successfully yesterday. We watched the live coverage of the landing on NASA TV’s web feed. It’s always fun to watch these big NASA events; we get quite caught up in the excitement as everyone waits to find out whether the last five years of work (in this case) is going to pay off in the form of gathering unprecedented data from another planet, or whether it’s merely going to leave a new crater on that planet’s surface.
That’s one of the first photos sent back from Phoenix. Of course I immediately wondered whether they actually had a color camera on the thing, but no, the coloring is artificial.
