That looks like some impressive mission planning....

[brooksmoses]

teinedreugan and wcg, I don't know if this bit of satellite control is actually as impressive as it looks or not, but it looks pretty impressive to my untrained eye. The first picture on this blog post shows the positions of the three Mars orbiters at the time the Pheonix lander goes through final descent on Mars this Sunday. Not only is the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter directly on top of the landing spot when it lands, but the other two are also within line-of-sight to record and relay signals from it.

Here's hoping that what they relay is a nice perfect landing!

Comments

[teinedreugan.livejournal.com]

Well, it's certainly good planning, either way. :> I don't know how the orbits of the orbiters are arranged, but I'm sure they tried to calculate windows when the landing site would be covered by at least one of the orbiters. With good software support, it's relatively straightforward to calculate windows of time where line-of-sight for the orbiters would be possible.

[suzanne.livejournal.com]

So modest. *hugs*

suzi