NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is on the Red Planet’s surface. Touchdown was confirmed shortly before 7:00 (CDT) Sunday evening. Two hours later, the probe sent back its first raw images from the surface of the northern pole of Mars. The new images can be viewed here. The spacecraft took about eight minutes to land after entering the Martian atmosphere.

Image above caption:
Phoenix Raw Image
This is a raw, or unprocessed, image taken by the Phoenix lander on Mars, May 25, 2008. This is a screen grab taken from NASA TV. Phoenix Lands at Martian Arctic Site.NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft landed in the northern polar region of Mars today to begin three months of examining a site chosen for its likelihood of having frozen water within reach of the lander’s robotic arm.

Hours before the anticipated landing, Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson said, “We are excited at how close we are right now to beginning our study of a site where Martian water ice will be within our reach, after all these years of preparations. Our science mission begins as the spacecraft settles into its new home on Mars.”

Touchdown was deemed the most challenging part of the entire mission, getting from the top of the atmosphere to a safe landing on three legs. Internationally, only five of the 11 attempts to land a spacecraft on Mars have succeeded.

The Phoenix mission is led by Smith, with project management at JPL. The development partnership is with Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions are from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; the Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.