The Phoenix has landed
About 30 minutes ago NASA Phoenix satellite landed at the north pole of Mars. The preliminary transmissions suggest that everything went according to plan.
My department opened up its doors for a public viewing of the video feed from JPL, so I watched it along with close to 100 others, most of which were general public.
Seeing the anticipation in the faces in the mission control turn to excitement as each phase of the landing passed successfully made me look forward to putting my first instrument on a telescope taking the first spectum. I won't be doing anything quite as complicated as landing something on another planet, but at least I'll be able to see and tweak my toy.
I also felt like I was living a Schrödinger's cat Gedankenexperiment. The light travel time from Mars to Earth is 15 minutes. So while we were hearing that "Phoenix has just entered the atmosphere" or "at an altitude of 30 meters above the surface", it all happened 15 minutes ago. There's something about realizing that while you anxiously wait to hear the results of the parachute deployment, the spacecraft has either already landed successfully or crashed.
In other news I biked 26 miles today, nine of them were hill climbing. The moral of today is that I have a lot of work to do before riding three days of RAGBRAI. And most of that work will be done in the Bay Area. I'm leaving next Tuesday (June 3) and returning August 7th. I'm starting to get excited about it.
My department opened up its doors for a public viewing of the video feed from JPL, so I watched it along with close to 100 others, most of which were general public.
Seeing the anticipation in the faces in the mission control turn to excitement as each phase of the landing passed successfully made me look forward to putting my first instrument on a telescope taking the first spectum. I won't be doing anything quite as complicated as landing something on another planet, but at least I'll be able to see and tweak my toy.
I also felt like I was living a Schrödinger's cat Gedankenexperiment. The light travel time from Mars to Earth is 15 minutes. So while we were hearing that "Phoenix has just entered the atmosphere" or "at an altitude of 30 meters above the surface", it all happened 15 minutes ago. There's something about realizing that while you anxiously wait to hear the results of the parachute deployment, the spacecraft has either already landed successfully or crashed.
In other news I biked 26 miles today, nine of them were hill climbing. The moral of today is that I have a lot of work to do before riding three days of RAGBRAI. And most of that work will be done in the Bay Area. I'm leaving next Tuesday (June 3) and returning August 7th. I'm starting to get excited about it.
posted by laura s at 8:26 PM
2 Comments:
And if your instrument doesn't work right the first time, you haven't just splatted half a billion dollars!
Those hills were murder. I wanna do it again.
Thats so cool I wish I have could have have been there. I need to find a good reason to visit New York state.
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