In The Field
Phoenix landing: Bittersweet history
No, that isn’t Phoenix PI Peter Smith. And that’s not the Surface Stereo Imager. That’s a decade old picture of David Paige, PI for the doomed Mars Polar Lander, with the previous incarnation of the SSI. On one of the recent Phoenix conference calls, a journalist asked — had anyone talked to Paige? Did he watch the landing? Good questions. I called him up — he’s a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles — and had a quick chat. Turns out he did watch the Phoenix landing from JPL, with his 5-year-old son. First, the background. Mars