Democratic Underground - Here's the latest: Phoenix on Mars

The HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was the instrument that imaged the lander descending. It also imaged the lander, heat shield, parachute and back shell on the surface.

I got the link from Phil Platt's latest post at the Bad Astronomy blog. Here's his comment on the picture:

This is quite an extraordinary picture. The Phoenix lander is bluish and sits at the top of the field. You can see dust disturbed around it, no doubt from the exhaust of the landing thrusters as it descended. At the bottom is the bright parachute, and just above it is the back shell; the part of the apparatus that connected the parachute to the lander. To the right center is the heat shield, blackened by its fiery descent. It must have bounced when it hit, making the blurry splotch to the left of the better-defined shield itself. And, of course, zooms are provided. Looks like the back shell bounced a bit too, or was dragged a little by the parachute.

edited to add: Oops! In the next paragraph, I got the descent path going the wrong way. In the comments, To Seek made a good point: the heat shield would still be moving rapidly when it was ejected from the lander, while the lander was slowing due to the drag from the ‘chute. I forgot about momentum and which part of the lander was slowing! So the actual entry angle is from the upper left, moving to the lower right. Everything else is pretty much the same though.

An earlier post by Phil had a link to the Planetary Society blog page with the orbiter descending pix, including a magnified picture of the lander on its parachute.

I loved Phil's comments on this:

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.

Edited to add: Sorry if this is a bit wide for people with older monitors like mine. This was just the best image I could find.

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