Go, go Phoenix! 18 hours until launch...

Well, here we go; the once-every-two-year event of a spacecraft deprarture from Earth toward Mars is less than a day away, weather permitting. The original launch date (today) would have given my daughter the biggest candle ever to light her first birthday cake, but that was not to be. Now I REALLY hope that the launch will go off tonight, if only for the selfish reason that I do not want to have to wake up more than once at 2 in the morning to see if the thing is really going to go. (Once upon a time, I would have stayed up to watch the launch, but with at least one family member going to bed at 7:30 it now seems a better plan to try to get a few hours' sleep in before the rocket ignites.)

I went through the Phoenix mission press kit yesterday in an attempt to compose a timeline for the launch story that Amir Alexander posted but I'm afraid that details on the timing of launch events were unusually scanty. The best I can do is to take the launch timeline I wrote for Dawn -- which has the same exact events, though not the same exact durations -- and fill in the few skimpy timing details that were provided in the Phoenix press kit. So here you go.