Sunday, May 25, 2008

Mars, baby! RED ROCKS!


Images from NASA Phoenix
Mission page
, May 25, 2008.

Images are from MARS!


The Phoenix lander has begun relaying images from its landing site in the North Polar region of Mars. This is exciting stuff! So many Mars missions have failed, one way or another, that there's an added sense of accomplishment on top of the fact that we are currently looking at images from ANOTHER! FREAKING! PLANET!

All this for the low, low cost of $420,000,000. What's that, you say? $420,000,000 is a lot of money? Nonsense! Conservative estimates put the cost of George Bush's Discretionary War at twenty million dollars an hour. So the cost of this mission amounts to twenty-one hours of the "War On Terror." We spend more money each day on war than we did on this entire freaking mission.

So, yes. $420,000,000? Totally, totally worth it.

ANOTHER! FREAKING! PLANET!


Also see:
NASA's Phoenix Mission page
University of Arizona's Phoenix Mars Mission page
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy
- First light pictures from Phoenix
- Phoenix has landed!
The Planetary Society Weblog
Title reference: Paraphrase from Dave Chappelle's "Black Bush" skit.

2 comments:

whimsical brainpan said...

YAY! Last I heard it hadn't landed yet. Glad it made it ok and can't wait for the data it will send back. :-)

dee said...

There's nothing liking watching a lot of geeks at the JPL jumping up and down like the football team that just won the state championship. The first pictures are breathtaking. They can spend my money on this kind of stuff any time.