Welcome to Phoenix’s landing site:
From a risk point of view, it’s beautifully boring. It was funny to hear PI Peter Smith trying to convince people that the area was actually interesting. “I know it looks a lot like a parking lot, but it’s a safe place to land,” he said. It seems that the MER missions have spoiled us with their explorations of deep craters, hills, and snazzy rocks. Not much of that here. Besides, the good stuff, and the point of the mission, is underneath the surface. We’ll see just how great the landing site is in several days (or more) when the data starts coming back.
This first contextual image, however, is amazing. It’s exactly what the mission is after. Looking into the distance, you can see little mounds. In the foreground are subtle indentations in the ground forming a square-shaped patch of land. These are thermal contraction polygons, a hallmark of permafrost environments on Earth and seen all over the place (from orbit) on the northern plains of Mars.
Here’s what it looks like on Earth:
Seeing these polygons tells you something about the area’s thermal regime. In the winters, the ground contracts enough to create cracks, and water (on Earth) and dust fall into those cracks. When it gets warmer, again, the contracted ground can’t expand outward any more, so it pushes upward in the center of the polygon: it is these bulges that we are seeing from Phoenix. The shapes are polygonal because that pattern is energetically favored when the temperature changes.
So now we get to wait. It’s a little frustrating because I’m sure everyone wants to get out there and see what we’ve got, but a series of checks and tests need to happen first. But stay tuned!
Wow, awesome stuff. Thanks for putting the polygons in context, Jeff. I think there’s a press conference at 5pm UK time today.
It is frustrating. Do you know when we should anticipate seeing any sort of results?
Phoenix Mars Mission Gallery
There’s also a Twitter feed MarsPhoenix
Yeah, not too sure about the timeline – I’ve been hearing “several days” sorts of estimates, after power and communications are fully set up and each instrument is brought online. I’m especially curious to see how well the scoop works – if the ground is too hard, for example, that would be quite unfortunate.