Truly out of this world parachute drop

Over the weekend, NASA's Phoenix lander successfully touched down on the arctic plains of Mars.

At left is an artist's depiction of how the landing may have looked.

We're used to artists' depictions. There were NASA-provided animations of stage separations and, later, landings back when Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman were holding up plastic models in front of the camera to illustrate their points.

But behold something new -- and truly out of this world:

This is no artist's depiction: This is an actual photograph of the Phoenix lander descending toward the Martian surface, an image captured from Martian orbit by a different satellite.