New Views Show Old NASA Mars Landers
New color images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show the agency's 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander and the lander that carried its rover Spirit to Mars in 2004.
The High  Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars  Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded a scene on Jan. 29, 2012, that includes the  first color image from orbit showing the three-petal lander of NASA's Mars  Exploration Rover Spirit mission. Spirit drove off that lander platform in  January 2004 and spent most of its six-year working life in a range of hills about  two miles to the east.Another  recent image from HiRISE, taken on Jan. 26, 2012, shows NASA's Phoenix Mars  Lander and its surroundings on far-northern Mars after that spacecraft's second  Martian arctic winter.  Phoenix exceeded  its planned mission life in 2008, ending its work as solar energy waned during  approach of its first Mars winter.The image showing Spirit's lander platform as a small, bright feature southwest of Bonneville Crater is athttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia15038. The new image of Phoenix is at:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia15110. The discarded back shell of the Phoenix mission's spacecraft is in an image at:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia15039.Previous  color images from HiRISE have shown the Spirit rover itself, but all previous  HiRISE views of the lander that delivered Spirit were in black and white.Although  neither Phoenix nor Spirit still send data to Earth, scientific findings from  both missions continue as researchers analyze the wealth of data from the two. A  recent report based on inspection of Martian soil particles with microscopes on  Phoenix concluded that the soil has experienced very little interaction with  liquid water over the past 600 million years or more (seehttp://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_3-2-2012-10-26-2).The Mars  Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining Mars with six science instruments  since 2006. Now in an extended mission, the orbiter continues to provide insights  into the planet's ancient environments and how processes such as wind,  meteorite impacts and seasonal frosts are continuing to affect the Martian  surface today. This mission has returned more data about Mars than all other  orbital and surface missions combined.More than 21,000  images taken by HiRISE are available for viewing on the instrument team's website:http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu. Each  observation by this telescopic camera covers several square miles, or square  kilometers, and can reveal features as small as a desk.HiRISE is  operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball  Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.  The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and  the Mars Exploration Rover Project are managed by the Jet Propulsion  Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,  Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, also  in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter.  For more information about the Mars  Reconnaissance Orbiter, seewww.nasa.gov/mro.The  University of Arizona led the Phoenix mission with project management at JPL  and development partnership at Lockheed Martin. International contributions  came from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland;  the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute  in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and Imperial College of  London.