An amazing new set of images taken by the MOC team at Malin Space Sciences reveal Spirit in situ - a human artefact of the surface of an alien planet. We strain our eyes through our most sensitive camera in an orbit 100 million miles from home - and we see ourselves, down on the sand, at the edge of visibility, a single pixel in the desert. The circuit is complete.
We see how we got there - a chain of dents in the surface where Spirit's airbags bounced along. We see the litter - the parachute, the heat shield - unavoidably strewn around the place in the haste of our descent. We see where we're going (if the flash memory can be properly disciplined). And we see how fantastically precise our knowledge of the distant situation is; the point in the picture where Spirit's controllers thought their spacecraft was, on the basis of the landmarks they saw surrounding it, is within ten metres of where the thing actually is, as seen from above. Ten metres!
For the first time, we're looking at an alien planet, and we're seeing not our hopes or our fears or any of our futures - but our present. Is there life on Mars? There is now.
Note added later: the Planetary Society's page on this is a much quicker download. And it also shows up a touch of hyperbole on my part: the lander's more than a pixel -- you can see the shape of the petals.
Comments