The Phoenix Mars probe has landed successfully and there are already some cool images available on their website.

And on the topic of space exploration…

Above is “The Universe in Powers Of Ten”. I’d seen similar videos and graphics before, but never one so well narrated and contextualised as this. This one is also excellent in that it goes backwards to reveal the spatial relation of things on the atomic level.

From Neatorama, where I found the video:

In this ’70s video clip by the office of Charles and Ray Eames for IBM, you can see the relative size of things in the universe. The clip starts with a view of a couple on a picnic, then the camera zooms out by a factor of ten farther. Every ten seconds, the view expands by a power of ten… Then it zooms back down, also in a power of ten, down to the quantum level …