Phoenix Mars Lander

Eric and I took Jarron on a tour of the facility that houses the Phoenix Mars Lander team.  This was a once in a lifetime opportunity that gave me serious goosebumps.  It is amazing what the human race can accomplish in space (just wish we could say the same here on earth! Go Obama!)  For those of you that are not familiar with this expedition, it launched in August of 2007 and landed successfully on Mars May of 2008 with a Mission to study the history of water on Mars. Here is the link if you would like to learn more  http://fawkes1.lpl.arizona.edu/index.php

Here we are at the beginning of the tour where there was a slide show of actual pictures on Mars, some of them 3-D which were Jarron's favorite.  My favorite was the picture showing a cd disc on top of the lander which I knew had Jarron's name on it.  I was able to register his name, along with 250,000 others, back in the beginning of 2007 to go to Mars.
Jarron is standing next to a smaller scale replica of the shovel from the Phoenix used to take dirt and rock samples on Mars.

Jarron is controlling a robotic arm, similar to one on the Phoenix, to paint with.  It was very hard to control.