Phoenix Mars Mission landing to occur Sunday May 25, 2008

[Damien Nelson]

We are supposed to start getting photos back at earth around 6:30 PM! If you get a chance, check out the NASA TV stream. There's a link to it on our home page at spacecoalition.com

[Damien Nelson]

There was a 2:00 PM CST update where NASA TV stated that all was well. Something I thought was interesting is that the vehicle is traveling at 6,300 MPH increasing to 8,500 MPH and finally over 12,000 MPH near final entry and then they have 7 minutes to take the speed down to 0 MPH. The parachutes will slow the vehicle down from 1,100 MPH to about 120 MPH. There are jets under the vehicle that do the final slowing above the ground. Once on the ground, the vehicle deploys solar panels, a camera and environmental monitoring devices. The landing zone is above the artic circle.