Phoenix has landed!

Congrats to the Phoenix team on their successful landing on Mars!

I went to a talk last week by Fuk Li, the manager of JPL's Mars Exploration Program, where he basically spent an hour going through all the different ways that things could go wrong with the landing, listing all of the hundreds of little things that had to work perfectly, including a few things that are out of NASA's control, like what happens if you land cockeyed on a big rock? And I have to admit that I walked out of that talk a little worried. It's really hard to land on Mars, really hard. But, you know what, NASA is really good at what it does. Way to go guys!