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Updated 6:31 PM PDT with initial information from the arrival of Phoenix on Mars and then again at 7:20 PM PDT with one of the first images from the lander. That follows an earlier update to reflect the Phoenix lander's acceleration as it approached Mars and to clarify its speed and course in traveling through space.

NASA said Sunday evening that radio signals have been received from the Phoenix spacecraft on the surface of Mars.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is the latest embodiment of humankind's quest to learn whether life might once have been sustainable on the Red Planet and to prepare for eventual human exploration there.

But before it can dig into the surface, Phoenix first had to traverse the Martian atmosphere. Those seven minutes of descent, the very last leg of the months-long journey, are what could have been the killer: the lander, its developers say, faced "seven minutes of terror" before touching down. Of 11 total previous attempts by several nations to put a spacecraft on Mars, according to NASA, only five had been successful.

In entering the thin Martian atmosphere and heading to the surface, Phoenix faced these tribulations: "aeroshell braking" via friction with the atmosphere that would heat it to thousands of degrees, a parachute opening that would give the lander a hard jerk to slow it further, and pulsing retrorockets tasked with making a soft touchdown.

Because it takes 15 minutes for signals to travel between Mars and Earth, Phoenix was designed to land autonomously. The confirming signal came shortly before 5:00 p.m. PDT Sunday.

"We've passed the hardest part and we're breathing again, but we still need to see that Phoenix has opened its solar arrays and begun generating power," Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement Sunday. Batteries are providing power at the moment.

NASA said that it expects to learn the status of the solar arrays later Sunday night, along with information on whether the stereo camera and weather station have been moved into their deployed positions, as Phoenix relays signals via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. The first attempt to use the 7.7-foot robotic arm will come in a couple of days.

In the final day or two before landing, all was well.

"The spacecraft is in good health," Brent Shockley, Phoenix configuration and information management engineer at NASA, wrote in the Phoenix Mars Lander blog on Saturday. On Sunday, NASA reported that it had decided not to make any final adjustment to the spacecraft's trajectory.

In its approach to Mars, the vehicle had been traveling at an incredibly high rate of speed--though exactly how fast depends on the point of reference. Shockley wrote Friday: "Phoenix is currently traveling 75,400 miles per hour with respect to Earth. With respect to the sun, however, Phoenix is traveling 44,300 miles per hour. With respect to Mars, Phoenix is traveling a modest 6,090 miles per hour."

At midday Sunday, NASA said things were accelerating: "The spacecraft's speed relative to Mars increased from 6,300 miles per hour at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time to 8,500 mph at 12:30 p.m., headed for a speed higher than 12,000 mph before reaching the top of the Martian atmosphere."

Shockley joked in his blog about the spacecraft's energy efficiency. "At a time when gas prices are soaring," he wrote, "Phoenix is getting good fuel economy at about 2 million miles per gallon."

The mission on Mars
Phoenix is taking up residency in the north polar region of Mars, where researchers expect it to find "ice-rich permafrost" underneath the rocky, dusty surface. In 2002, the Mars Odyssey orbiter indicated that there could be large amounts of subsurface water ice in that area.

The lander is now about 170 million miles from Earth--after having traveled 422 million miles through space after liftoff from Earth in August.

Using its robotic arm, Phoenix will dig into the surface to bring up both soil and ice. In its platform structure, the lander will then analyze those samples to help scientist on Earth create models of Mars' historic climate and to predict future atmospheric conditions.

Water on Mars exists only in solid and gaseous form, though previous missions to and around the planet have suggested that it once flowed in liquid form--as recently, NASA says, as about 100,000 years ago.

Scientists are also hoping that Phoenix can help determine "habitability" properties of the soil such as pH and saltiness.

The Stereo Surface Imager atop the lander, meanwhile, will produce panoramic images of the surface with a resolution of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels.

Even with a successful landing and initial operation, the Phoenix machinery isn't likely to have more than a short-term mission. Besides simply operating in the extreme cold of the Martian arctic and facing a potential onslaught of dust storms, it is not expected to get back into operation after the Martian winter when its solar panels will be rendered ineffective by complete darkness.

That said, no one expected the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity to last more than a few months, and they ended up sending back data for a number of years.

There was only one product at CES 2008 that I couldn't wait to get--a new model of safe from the Sentry Safe company. I even tried to buy one from Sentry's website one evening while I was still in Las Vegas, but that turned out to be impossible; it has to be shipped by truck freight, so I had to place the order with Sentry over the phone to make those arrangements.

I ordered the safe when I got back home, and it arrived here last week--a good bit sooner than the company predicted. I've got it all set up and it's all working. I'm very happy with it.

I got the QE5541, the largest model in a new line of six fire- and water-resistant safes designed to protect CDs, DVDs, flash drives, iPods, etc. from fires lasting up to two hours at temperatures up to 1,850° F.

And the really cool thing is that it'll also protect a 2.5" USB hard drive...while the drive is operating and connected to a computer outside the safe via a USB passthrough in the safe door. So for the first time, your backups can be continuously protected, even if you're not around.

If you're like most people, you don't even make regular backups of your personal computer. Most people who lose digital family photos, electronic book manuscripts, and disk files containing critical financial records to house fires don't make backups, either. But the worst thing must be to have a full set of backups get burned up along with your computer.

It's never happened to me, but I try to learn from my own mistakes before I make them. During 2007, I nearly placed an order for the Phoenix Datacare 2025 Media Safe, which is available from the Keystone Safe Company and other Internet vendors. The 2025 is another fire- and water-resistant safe designed to protect computer media. It has an internal volume of 1.22 cubic feet and costs $1,579 from Keystone. Compared with other safes I considered, the Phoenix was a pretty good deal.

Sentry's QE5541, by comparison, has an internal volume of 2.0 cubic feet and costs $519.99. Freight costs for both safes are similar, around $75 for basic delivery. So the Sentry safe is a really great deal.

And then there's that USB connection. That's unique. It makes the Sentry safe useful in a way the Phoenix safe could never be. I can stick a USB-powered hard disk inside--there's a pocket for it on the door--and run my nightly backups, or Apple's Time Machine software, without having to remember to move the disk drive into the safe after the backup finishes.

There are some limitations. The disk drive has to be a 2.5" USB-powered model because there's no separate power pass-through on the safe, just the USB connection. In my testing, a new Western Digital Passport 320GB drive worked fine but some older USB-powered drives didn't. Even the Passport didn't work unless I hooked up the second power connector on the USB cable Sentry provides to hook up the safe to a computer.

The problem is that USB ports provide +5V DC power and USB-powered hard drives require +5V DC power. That may sound more like a solution than a problem, but the USB specification also requires that power-hungry USB peripherals such as hard drives be connected to a USB port through just one cable. On the Sentry safe, there are effectively three cables: one outside the safe, one inside the safe, and one buried in the door of the safe to bring the USB connection through.

The resistance of all that extra wire and the extra connectors causes a voltage drop that could interfere with proper operation of the hard drive. I tested the power inside the safe with the hard drive running using a special USB cable I built for testing purposes some years ago. The final voltage was only barely in spec with the Passport and significantly lower with those older drives. But Sentry provides high-quality cables and connectors, and I think it should be reliable as long as you're using the provided cables and a good hard drive.

There's another consequence of this issue: there isn't enough power coming into the safe to run more than one hard drive. You'd need a hub in the safe, but bus-powered USB hubs don't provide enough power for USB hard drives anyway. I was able to use a bus-powered hub to hook up several flash drives just for testing purposes, but there's little practical value to that. I'd like to see Sentry offer a model that can support one or more full-size (3.5") drives, but in that situation, heating could be a problem; a fire safe has to be well-insulated, so even the ten watts or so produced by a 3.5" hard drive might be too much.

(I have my own solution to that problem, which I hope to discuss with Sentry at some point.)

I said earlier that the QE5541 is one of six new safes from Sentry, but that's an oversimplification. Two of these models, the QA0002 and QA0004, are actually just hard drives permanently sealed in a protective safe-like case. They're like big, heavy, virtually indestructible external USB-powered hard drives. Unfortunately, they're also just 80GB and 160GB drives based on Maxtor mechanisms, well behind today's state of the art in USB-powered drives. And at $339.99 for the 160GB model, they're expensive, too.

Sentry provides an interesting service for these two models. From the Web page: "If your Sentry Safe hard drive experiences fire or water damage, we will attempt to recover your data free of charge and send you a new unit." That's a good deal.

Sentry's $99.99 QA0110 is designed to protect up to 100 CDs or DVDs, but doesn't have a USB pass-through, so I don't find this model particularly attractive.

The QE5541 I bought has a smaller sibling, the QE4531, with 1.2 cubic feet of interior space plus the USB passthrough. If I bought the Papa Bear model, the QE4531 is for Mama Bear.

The remaining model, then, would be Baby Bear's--the QA0121, which can hold 60 optical disks plus a standard 2.5" USB-powered hard drive like the Passport. I think this one will be "just right" for most people, and at a price of $169.99, it's a lot more affordable than the big models. The one downside to the QA0121 is that the fire protection is only good for 30 minutes at 1,550° F. That's probably adequate for most residential fires, but you should think about how long it's likely to take for your local fire department to respond, how soon they can get to your home office, and what the construction of your house is like.

I wanted the extra protection and security of the QE5541, however, so that's what I bought. Sentry said it would take 3 to 5 weeks to arrive, but it got here in just ten days. It was delivered to my driveway in a big cardboard box with a small forklift-type wood pallet on the bottom; it was up to me to get it up the front steps and into the house. I was prepared for that, but if you need inside delivery, be sure to ask for it. (Sentry didn't mention that service when I placed my order, but it's a routine add-on from most shipping companies.)

Once I had the safe inside and located where I wanted it, I drilled a couple of holes through the bottom of the safe as directed in Sentry's documentation so I could use the provided lag screws to secure the safe to the floor. This procedure is easy enough, but if you want to do the same you'll need a drill with the right bit, plus a suitable tool for driving in the lag screws.

Then it was just a matter of installing the batteries for the electronic lock, testing the combination a few times (the safe comes with one predefined combination; you can set more), and hooking up the hard drive.

I've moved in all my backup media, some old external hard drives I'm not using, original install disks for my commercial software, and three complete older laptops. (The product page mentions "protects up to 72 CDs and DVDs" but this refers only to the capacity of a removable shelf provided with the safe. The safe will actually hold hundreds of DVDs on spindles or in the Maxell Double Slimline jewel cases I use.) I feel a lot better knowing that these items are now much more likely to survive a house fire.

If I have a fire, I'll post here about how well the safe works. But I hope I never have to make good on that promise!

It isn't often legal nightmares are resolved quickly. In fact, anything pertaining to the law tends to drag on tirelessly.

But for the two executives at Village Voice Media who spent a night in jail last week, their legal woes were abated before the weekend arrived. On Friday afternoon, I wrote about how Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were incarcerated after they published details in the Phoenix New Times about a subpoena they received. Hours later, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, dropped all the charges against Lacey, Larkin and the paper.

Dennis Wilenchik, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, was removed from the investigation by Thomas the same day. Wilenchick has denied any wrongdoing, stating that "his investigation was not 'grossly mishandled or mismanaged,'" and he will not stand to have his reputation tarnished.

While it's not entirely clear what prompted the county attorney to drop the charges and remove Wilenchick, The Arizona Republic points out, that "Thomas' announcement came just hours after the State Bar Association confirmed that it had received multiple complaints and had launched an internal investigation into Thomas and special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik for their actions in the New Times case and an unrelated one."

... Read More

Phoenix Motorcars, the guys who want to bring you all-electric SUVs and trucks, won't be coming out with their cars this year after all.

CEO Dan Elliot posted this note on the company's site late Thursday night:

"We must also thank you for your patience in our development progress as we have worked to bring our product to market. We recognize that our product rollout has taken longer than originally expected as we continue to work through certification with the California Air Resources Board (ARB), finalize our financing package, and set up our production facility that will allow us to deliver at the sales volumes we are targeting.

"While Phoenix Motorcars had hoped to begin initial deliveries of its vehicles by this fall, we have decided to delay deliveries until early 2008," the note stated.

Getting cars through the certification process isn't easy and costs a lot of money. Testing--along with the millions of dollars required for design and manufacturing and advertising--is one of the many reasons why you don't see a lot of successful auto start-ups. Tesla Motors is still finalizing testing on its roadster, which it hopes to get out before the end of the year.

Phoenix has more than 500 orders for cars. Pacific Gas and Electric is one customer, Phoenix says. The company has shown its cars at the White House and the Lake Tahoe Summit.

The company's SUVs run on the lithium titanate batteries from Altair Nanotechnologies. The cars are expected to run for about 130 miles on a single charge and hit about 100 miles per hour. The key to the battery, says Altair CEO Alan Gotcher, is that it can be recharged quickly.

The SUVs will first be sold to utility companies and municipalities. These companies buy large fleets of cars and often they don't leave town. Thus, the 100-mile range isn't as big a problem as it is for the consumer market. Later, it will hit up consumers. (Here is an article on Phoenix CNET News.com wrote last year.)

Phoenix is one of a number of companies pumping electric cars. There is also Miles Automotive in Southern California.