CHECK. IT. OUT. The Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting Mars for the past two years, took a picture of Phoenix as it parachuted towards its successful landing on Mars last night. That is SO FREAKING COOL. In fact, this may be the most amazing photo I have ever seen. Something we sent all the way to Martian orbit was able to capture a photo of something else that we sent all the way to the Martian surface. Amazing.
More Phoenix info is all over the web for those of you who are interested (and that should be pretty much everyone because landing things on Mars is pretty dang cool).
My first take was: “Interesting, there’s no smear from the movement of the lander.” It’s still moving probably >100 m/s, if this was in-flight and the lander was still attached to the chute. So, I did some research. MRO’s camera uses a ‘push-broom’ method, where it basically captures the next row of pixels every 76 microseconds and builds these images that are over a billion pixels in size. So at the resolution of 0.7 m/pixel, it would have covered the chute to backshell distance (25 meters as a guess, or 34 pixels) in 0.003 seconds. The lander would have traveled less than half a pixel in that time! So it passes that sanity test. Awesome!