Checking in at JPL

I drove in to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to pick up my badge today and scope out the press area for the Phoenix landing event, from which I'll be blogging and doing webcasts. I was delighted to see that this year's badges aren't radioactive orange with huge black letters saying "PRESS," as they have been in past years. (Those might as well have said "DON'T TALK TO ME!") I was pretty much the first media person to show up, so I was able to pick a place to sit that has a good view of the TV monitors tuned to the NASA feed, and, more importantly, is out of the glare of the overhead lighting. The press room is (as usual for big events at JPL) in the museum attached to the Von Karman auditorium, so the lighting is designed for spotlighting museum displays. It's a bit glare-y, but it's also nice to sit and work and be able to look over my shoulder to the full-scale model of Galileo, and other such memorabilia. The press briefings are to be held in the auditorium proper, which contains a full-scale model of one of the Voyager spacecraft, an object that I regard with some reverence, like one might feel for the gold-and-ivory statue of Athena that once stood inside the Parthenon. Von Karman is no Parthenon, of course, but I hope you get my meaning.

All was pretty quiet; I saw a couple of random JPL personnel, and a couple of random media people, and that was it. I'm sure it will be much busier when I check in tomorrow. I'm still planning on trying a Ustream chat from there at 13:00 my time (20:00 UTC) tomorrow. I tested out the Internet connection and everything seemed to work.

I'm putting the finishing touches on a timeline of all the events on landing day. Here's the latest info that I have. Please contact me if you notice any errors or points of confusion.

Event times are given in Spacecraft Event Time (SCET), which is the time according to the spacecraft's clock, and also Earth Received Time (ERT), which accounts for the 15 minutes and 20 seconds it takes radio signals to traverse the 275 million kilometers (171 million miles) separating Earth and Mars on landing day. ERT is given both in Universal Time (UTC) and Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). To follow a realtime simulation of the landing events, visit http://dmuller.net/phoenixor its mirror site. To watch a realtime simulation of the landing events, download the "Heads-up display" animation from the Phoenix website.

Touchdown should happen at 23:38:32 SCET / 23:53:52 ERT (UTC) / 16:53:52 ERT (PDT), give or take 46 seconds.

Finally, I want to mention that a sharp-eyed reader noticed an error in one of the landing site maps I posted yesterday -- the longitude labels on the colorful geologic map were off by half a degree, which meant that the ellipses I'd plotted on that map were also off by half a degree. Here's the repaired map; I also updated it in the previous post.