The cover of the June 9, 2008 Aviation Week & Space Technology features a mosaic of the area around one foot of the Phoenix Mars lander. Dr. Ken Kremer, one of the figures who prepared the mosaic for the magazine, kindly provided us with a copy of the image for use online. The caption that appears in AW&ST is shown below the image here--

The Phoenix Mars lander footpad to the left of an apparent large block of water ice, which was cleared of topsoil by descent rockets, indicates the spacecraft literally touched down on top of the primary sampling objective of the mission near the Martian North Pole on May 25. A wider version, with more elements of the false-color mosaic, is above. Although Phoenix was specifically targeted to land on icy soils in the Martian arctic to look for organics and other clues to Martian life, researchers were prepared to methodically dig with the lander’s robotic arm to reach the solid ice especially important to such studies. They will still do that, but the ice may be no deeper than 5 cm. A robotic arm camera developed by the University of Arizona and Max Planck Institute in Germany was lowered by the arm to take this false-color image of the feature dubbed The Snow Queen. It is too far under the lander to be sampled directly, but will be studied to confirm that it is water ice, instead of salt or rock. The image also shows that a spring (right of footpad) was harmlessly lost from the Lockheed Martin spacecraft during landing (see p. 52). NASA/JPL/University of Arizona image mosaiced and color-coded for Aviation Week & Space Technology by Kenneth Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo.

I've also uploaded the same photo into our Space Showcase gallery, where you can see other Mars related photos as well, and we plan to add more in the future.