This really is an extraordinary picture (though Typepad seems to be trying to hide that fact: click on it for better resolution). It's Phoenix on its way down, caught from orbit by the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter's HiRISE camera, parachute deployed, shrounds taut, swiningin down like a gnat in a spotlight. (Also a salutary reminder that the surface of Mars, being basalt, is really really dark; this is not a night shot).
As I said way back here there's something truly remarkable about one spacecraft seen from another. Since then HiRISE has given us a bunch of shots of the MER landers (and indeed the Malin MOC did so before it). But this shot of a spacecraft in transit caught by another hundreds of kilometres away moving at a realtive velocity of thousands of kilometres an hour -- and the knowledge it implies of how well the people involved understand the precise positions and orientations of their minions half way across the sky -- is really something else.
Wow.
Eric at Nature's In the Field has more, on that picture and on everything else Phoenician.
UPDATE: BBC Radio Three just asked me to go on their Nightwaves slot and talk about Mars and images of Mars on the back of the Phoenix pictures. I did, and anyone who wants to hear it
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