I’ve always enjoyed watching anything to do with space on TV, especially with all of the Mars landings. Today the Phoenix craft landed successfully, and after watching the videos on the landing process I was amazed. It’s quite a futuristic landing using thrusters to come to a halt and then just dropping. Usually craft of this type just make their landing using just parachutes, but I assume they couldn’t in this case because the probe isn’t designed to move, therefore the parachutes couldn’t get in the way.
The one thing that gets me is that when you see the videos of the probes, you don’t get a real feel for it, especially for their size as they seem so small. Well, I ran across this picture today showing the real size of it, and it’s a crazy amount bigger than I thought. It’s "little" digger arm must be quite large.
