A Full Sized Model of Phoenix: 1 inch = 1 inch

I have blogged before about the Mars Phoenix Lander. It is controlled from Tucson (near the corner of 6th and Drachman for those of you who know the city). I visited the building today and snapped a few pictures I thought I would share.

The exterior of the building is covered with a neat mural created by a University of Arizona art class.

The mural depicts Phoenix launching from Earth and landing on Mars. Small squares around the mural have everything from a Delta II rocket to Peter Smith (Principal Investigator or PI) and Marvin Martian.

Inside is the PIT. The PIT contains a full size model of the rover with working copies of the science instruments. They use it for testing...before they send a command to Mars, they send it to this guy and make sure it does what they want. If they want to test something before trying it on Mars, this is where it gets tested.

This model is not designed to look quite like the real thing. they also have a model that looks the same on the outside, but does not have working science instruments.


Oh, and we should zoom in on the stereo camera.

Separated at birtht?

It shouldn't be too surprising that the eye structures are similar. Wall-e probably is designed to see in 3-D which works better with two eyes and so is the camera on Phoenix!