Well, I watched it all on the NASA TV feed (whilst working on bits and pieces for MITTS). Lots of technical mumbo jumbo that I couldn’t understand but at 00:56 Phoenix landed n the surface of Mars. Mission Control confirmed that the landing was good and they are in contact with Phoenix.

90 days of digging ahead before Phoenix goes to sleep for the Mars winter.

Me? I’m going to sleep now!

I love RSS feeds. For those readers that don’t know what RSS is it’s Really Simple Syndication and is a great way to pick up the latest information from blogs and websites that are regularly updated. I have an RSS for this blog, Mini Mini MIni has an RSS feed, as do websites such as Lifehacker, BBC News and Donncha.

Why would I specifically call out Donncha in this post? Well, it’s thanks to his RSS feed I found his post mentioning that Phoenix, the Mars lander is using Twitter for updates on the lander’s progress towards Mars.

According to the Twitter updates, Phoenix is 170 million miles from earth and transmissions take 15.3 minutes to reach earth, travelling at the speed of light - 186.000 miles per second.

Clicking through to the NASA TV website, there is a scheduled webcast for 6pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) which will broadcast, live, the Phoenix landing on Mars. EDT is 4 hours behind GMT. As the UK is one hour ahead of GMT at the moment, I think, the webcast will begin at 11pm BST. I am going to try and check at 9, 10 and 11 pm as I really want to see this unique event.

Phoenix was launched in August 2007 and has only just arrived. It’s aiming for the North Polar region of Mars and will be travelling at 12,600 mph when it hits the atmosphere. As a comparison, the shuttle is travelling at 17,000 mph when it breaks earth’s atmosphere.

Nerdy excitement ensues…

Update: According to the Phoenix page the lander will touch down on Mars at around 12:45am BST Monday 26 May 2008. Thank gods it’s a bank holiday tomorrow!