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- Fig. 1 - Image taken by robotic arm under lander
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- Some observations:
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- * Red arrow points to one of the Phoenix Lander pads,
which doesn't appear to show any rotation by the Phoenix Lander after
touching the soil.
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- * Despite thruster gases that can displace the soil or
sand, it appears that little if any of this material settled on the top
of the Lander's pad (red arrow.) Top of pad appears to be white without
granular surface material.
-
- * Mars has an atmosphere only 1% of Earth according to
NASA. This has yet to corroborated by any other non-NASA lander. The ESA's
Beagle Lander went silent during landing. There would be little atmospheric
resistance to dust flying out from under the Phoenix Lander, and some
of this material should be visible on the top of the Lander's pad. This
material could travel quite some distance before settling. There appears
to be a roughly circular area around the Lander where we don't see the
gravel-like material in the distance, but this is not conclusive evidence
and could be a coincidence.
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-
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- Fig. 2 - Artist's rendition of the spacecraft
landing showing locations of landing thrusters. Grey vertical box visible
at the top of the Lander (top-center) is the
- Lidar experiment from Canada to measure cloud
altitudes, up to 20KM or possibly higher.
-
- Last word about the LIDAR system was that it was not
operational. A special landing camera is mounted which points downward
only. This camera was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) which
is the same company found to be censoring images from Mars from another
Mars mission. MSSS was releasing tens of thousands of images at a time
which it claimed it didn't know it had, instead of releasing images as
they arrived. MSSS previewed and approved all the released images first,
even before NASA saw them. The Lander's camera had software crash problems
which could not be fixed by launch time according to JPL, but was left
in place.
-
- * Yellow lines in Fig. 1 show centers of thrust vectors
from engine bells with the angles shown when this photo was taken. The
Phoenix Lander has a group of these engines but only three are visible
here. Thrust lines do not line up with exposed white surfaces. There
is a possibility that the engine nozzles where not straight while in operation
to balance the vehicle, but we cannot determine that from this image.
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- * There are three engine nozzles but only two exposed
white areas. Another exposed area may be present in the lower left corner
of the image, but since it is not in sunlight we cannot tell for certain.
-
- I won't draw any conclusions but will leave that to the
reader's imagination.
-
- Ted Twietmeyer
- www.data4science.net
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