Pheonix lands on Sunday. It will look for Water and signs of life, tho not specifically life itself. It could find signs tho if it doesn’t take a picture of an ie worm it could accidently cooks up some microbe up in the ice dust.
It is the first power landing on Mars since Viking in the 70’s and NASA is a little worried about it
Just FYI - in my opinion it hasn’t got the press it needs
I know - I work at the U of AZ, which played a big part in the development. I’m trying to decide if I want to go to the touchdown countdown on Sunday.
A big part of me says I should, because when will I get to go to something like this again?
And the last thing the camera sees will be a Martian baseball heading right for the lens…
The Science Channel will be carrying live coverage from 7 to 9 PM ET Sunday, and you can get streaming video from NASA TV’s website.
In Canada, ‘Daily Planet’ on the Discovery channel is covering it live, starting at 5pm.
None of this stuff gets covered by the major media any more. It’s maddening. A couple of weeks ago a supernova is imaged as it explodes, which is a big deal. This week, mankind lands another spacecraft on Mars. And everyone is too busy bitching about politics and watching reality shows to bother to notice.
I’ll be following this as attentively as I can. I agree with Sam Stone–the luckluster reaction we’ve seen in the media is very discouraging . I think there’s actually a lot more interest out there than one might suppose from the coverage.
Maybe Obama will talk about the lander enthusiastically in a speech, and then the media will decide to cover it. 