Phoenix on Mars by HiRISE
I think this week is going to be a “Phoenix week”.
Yesterday we saw Phoenix on its way down to Mars. And today we see the lander sitting on the surface of the Red Planet, together with its parachute, backshell and heat shield, taken again by MRO‘s HiRISE camera.
The Phoenix lander is the bluish object at the top of the image. The solar arrays on each side of the lander are clearly visible, which are 5.5 m across.
The white patch at the bottom of the image is the parachute. Slightly above of the parachute is the backshell, the part that connected the lander to the parachute.
To the centre right is the heat shield. As the heat shield hit the ground, it bounced and landed slight to the upper right (the more defined patch in the inset). The impact and the bouncing left a blurry black patch on the surface.
Look carefully and you will see that there is some disturbance of dust around each object.
The image above shows the view from the top. How about an image of the hardware from the surface?
The white patch near the horizon is the parachute as seen by Phoenix.
For a sense of scale, the parachute is about 300 m away from Phoenix.
My Dark Sky 