Lost amidst the hoopla over video of a gray, bulbous space alien unveiled here last Friday by Jeff Peckman -- Denver’s UFO ambassador -- is the fact that NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft was also sending back some unbelievable pictures of Mars (though none of Martians yet, though).

The contrast didn’t go unnoticed hereabouts.

“Yes, I heard about that [video]. It was odd that it was happening at the same time,” said Lockheed Martin Space Systems spokesman Gary Napier.

Napier and others have their own perspective on space travel because the current $420 million project was built right here in our own backyard by folks at Lockheed Martin in their Waterton Canyon facility off South Wadsworth near Chatfield. That’s right. Some 300 or so Colorado neighbors such as Project Manager Ed Sedivy (a CSU grad) and other Colorado university alums have been at it since the contract was awarded in August, 2003. In between hiking, skiing and attending barbeques and school functions, they’ve been designing, engineering, programming, building, testing and -- since the project launch on Aug. 4, 2007 –- sweating.

Of course, the group isn’t made up of novices. The clean rooms at Waterton were where the first Viking lander was built and sent on to its trip in July, 1976. Many other craft have followed, and this mission control group is currently managing five projects, including satellites orbiting Mars and relaying information back here.

But it was the 15 minute or so descent on May 25, with relayed telemetry signals about speed and altitude as the Phoenix headed for the untouched Northern Plains surface of Mars, that the true nail-biting set in among the mission team, Napier said.

Then officially at 5:53 p.m. Mountain Time (not Mars) on that May Sunday, word traveling 15 minutes at the speed of light finally reached Earth – and Denver. The first craft in 32 years to complete a powered descent up there had touched down at 5 MPH and settled on the Red Planet.

“We were jubilant,” Napier said. And the mood is still elevated. "It's beyond successful."

And in true Colorado mining fashion, the Robotic Arm of the lander scooped up some of the Martian landscape. Something bright glittered in the soil. Was it ice? Diamonds that is. Gold? Who knows?
"That bright material might be ice or salt. We're eager to do testing of the next three surface samples collected nearby to learn more about it," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Phoenix co-investigator for the Robotic Arm.

Maybe it’s only fair. If they’re coming down here, we should be reaching back.

Still, despite what UFO-believers might hope for, the Phoenix isn’t looking for lost cousins. “It’s not looking for life,” Napier said. Instead, it’s testing for complex forms and carbon, especially in subsurface ice. “What if we did find life on Mars? What would that mean? Not intelligent life, but microbial forms?”

ET and others will have to wait for the video – or some good bobbing pictures.