NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander began sending photos of the planet’s surface on the first day of its three-month mission "to taste and sniff the northern glacial site’s soil and ice," the space agency said.
The first pictures, which the lander began taking presently after touching down near Mars’ north pole — the end of a 422 million-mile trek — showed a pattern of brown polygons as far as the camera could accept.
"It’s surprisingly attached to what we expected and that’s what surprises me most," said Peter Smith, the mission’s principal investigator. "I expected a bigger surprise."
The Sunday landing on the Red Planet’s arctic plains — which ended a 296-day journey — was right on target, a act NASA’s Ed Weiler compared to landing a hole-in-one with a golf ball from 10,000 miles.
The landing — dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" — was a nerve-wracking meet with for mission managers, who make witnessed the failure of similar missions.
In mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, they celebrated the lander’s opponent.
"It was better than we could have imagined," Barry Goldstein, project manager for the Phoenix mission, said.
From: rss.cnn.com
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