After NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander makes it nerve-wracking descent through the Martian atmosphere on Sunday and hopefully makes a safe landing on the surface of the red planet, mission scientists will not only be waiting with bated breath for the first beeps of radio signals from the craft, but also the first images it will send.

I had the opportunity yesterday to tour the Multimission Image Processing Lab (MIPL, pronounced “mipple”) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will be responsible for processing those images and sending them to both the Phoenix science team at the University of Arizona and to the public.

MIPL is housed in one of the many buildings on the JPL campus in a modest space that looks like most other government office buildings built in the 1960’s and ’70s (the elevator doors are still coated with that classic burnt orange paint color). But while the building may belong to a different era of NASA, MIPL is on the cutting edge of image and video processing technology. Huge posters of satellite images of Earth hang on the walls, along with a 3-D image of a model of Phoenix.

MIPL scientists Eric De Jong took us through the lab to meet the people who create the images, and to explain a little about how the lab will handle the images from Phoenix.

MIPL can get images from spacecraft out moments after the signal reaches Earth. That’s exactly what they did for Mars Pathfinder, De Jong told reporters. De Jong made a deal with mission scientist Peter Smith that if De Jong could send out the images before Smith saw them, he could have them out within a minute of receiving the signal — and he did, he told us proudly (I’d be proud too). For most missions now, “the images go out to the public as they arrive,” De Jong said.

The first images from Phoenix could arrive as soon as 10 pm EDT on landing day. But because of the “bent-pipe” transmission relay from Phoenix to the three Mars orbiters, when exactly the images will arrive is up in the air. But De Jong says that MIPL intends to send out any images as soon as they get them.

Both NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express will be keeping an eye on Phoenix as it plummets through the Martian atmosphere, perhaps even snapping some images of the craft’s orange and white striped parachute deployed. MIPL will process any images from MRO as well, which could also come out as soon as the night of the landing.

The team doesn’t just process images from the spacecraft, they also made the video animations that show what the Phoenix entry, descent and landing is supposed to be like. The team have also used satellite images and data to make 3-D videos of cloud cover on Earth, the Martian around the rover Spirit’s landing site and the roiling atmosphere of the Sun. Reporters were treated to a showing of these videos in the MIPL lab. Seeing a loop of solar material break free from the sun’s magnetic grip and pop out at you is pretty cool, I have to say.

Along the tour, we saw the room where scientists will be processing the images from Phoenix. And though it sat empty now, it will be buzzing with activity come Sunday.