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"We've got the science of our dreams laid out for us," the leader of the University of Arizona's Phoenix Mars Mission said as he returned home Monday afternoon to a throng of cheering colleagues.

Asked if he feels like a rock star, mission leader Peter Smith broke into a little air guitar at the campus celebration, singing a line from The Doors: "C'mon baby, light my fire."

It's clear that the new images and data coming out of Mars have already lighted the fire of Smith — who just returned from monitoring Sunday's successful Phoenix landing from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. — and other scientists.

UA researchers revealed another view of the red planet on Monday, but this one didn't come from the Phoenix Mars lander.

An image from the UA-developed HiRISE camera, which is aboard a satellite orbiting Mars, captured Phoenix during its speedy descent to Mars, complete with an open parachute that stands out sharply from the planet's darkened surface.

Experts with both UA missions, Phoenix and HiRISE, were awestruck.

"This is a spectacular image," said Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's an engineer's delight."

While not acknowledging so publicly, engineers with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had been planning the shot for weeks, hoping to capture Phoenix during one of the most critical aspects of the mission. They predicted they had roughly an 80 percent chance of viewing the lander as it flew through Mars' atmosphere.

The main reason for taking the image was so that engineers would have something to analyze should the mission go badly, said Alfred McEwan, the UA's principal investigator with the HiRISE imager.

While it was difficult to arrange the shot, a lot of the guesswork was taken out of the equation because of detailed projections that showed where the lander would be during its descent, McEwan said.

"It's just math," he said. "You time everything to point at it. Phoenix did what it was supposed to and the math worked."

HiRISE even picked up fine details such as the parachute lines extending to the lander, McEwan said.

The HiRISE camera has already captured a series of historic and detailed pictures of Mars' surface, though McEwan said this picture might beat them all.

"This one's really unique," he said. "This will be on my Top 10 list."

On Monday, with a little less than a full day on the surface of Mars, Phoenix had already began to take more images and run through a series of checks to determine whether everything is working, said Smith, the UA's principal investigator for the Phoenix mission.

The images downloaded so far show only a sliver of the area surrounding Phoenix, and the images released Monday evening and later in the week should provide the first panoramic view of the landscape.

Phoenix also was scheduled to take more pictures of the landing deck to make sure everything appeared to be working correctly.

One area of particular interest is the cover over Phoenix's robotic arm, which deployed successfully but appears to have not moved out of the way completely, Goldstein said.

This shouldn't pose a problem for the arm, but engineers are interested in determining what kept the cover from moving totally out of the way.

Overnight on Monday, mission planners in Tucson were expecting to receive the second round of images from Phoenix and to determine what would be the lander's next step, which might include the first movements of the robotic arm.

After having some more time to look at the first images delivered on Sunday night, Smith said it appears that the pattern of small rocks on Mars' surface doesn't match up with the crevices created by the expanding ice beneath the surface, which could possibly be evidence of another, more ancient surface.

Additionally, the shaped surface, which Smith has described as a series of polygons, implies that ice beneath the surface has been expanding and contracting, depending on the seasons.

That's exciting for Smith, as the evidence of ice is what sent Phoenix on its 10-month, 422-million-mile journey.

UA President Robert Shelton, who had been with Smith at JPL during the landing, was on hand at UA's gathering Monday to offer his congratulations, saying the work was the product of Arizona's investment in higher education and discovery.

"All of Arizona should take pride in this achievement," Shelton said.

On StarNet: Stay current with Phoenix Mars Mission news and information at azstarnet.com/science.