Friday, November 25, 2011

The Phoenix Landing

This is three years old and I can't believe I didn't mention it when it happened, but one of the utterly fascinating things involved with the Phoenix spacecraft is that another spacecraft, the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter in orbit around Mars, took pictures of Phoenix as it descended through the Martian atmosphere and after it landed. It just blows me away to think of two separate spacecraft coming into contact with each other like that.


The only thing that I find more mind-boggling than this is when Apollo 12 landed a stone's throw away from Surveyor 3 and the astronauts wondered on over to it.

1 comment:

Michael Caton said...

In a similar vein: not long ago a Japanese lunar surveyor got some nice pictures of the trails in the dust made by the Apollo 14 crew.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2034594/NASA-moon-landing-hoax-New-photographs-silence-conspiracy-theory.html