That event, a culmination of painstaking research and development, triumphed over a history of exploration plagued by crash landings, disappearances, technical collapses and other booboos collectively known as "The Mars Curse". (People in the scientific community, of course, being less superstitious, scrupulously attribute the failures to a being called "the Great Galactic Ghoul" which is known to live on a diet of space probes.) After 193 million kilometres of travel over almost ten months through the cold silent void, and at a cost of $420 million dollars, Phoenix is beaming pictures back to earth that prove what scientists have long suspected: that there are lots of little rocks all over the place.
I'm kidding. We already knew about the little rocks. Two Mars Exploration Rovers, called Spirit and Opportunity, have been labouring their way over those little rocks since 2004. Phoenix is there to stand in one spot and dig some inches into the Martian ground in the hope of finding what scientists think might be buried ice, judging from the polygonal lumps that dimple this region of Mars. What's really going on, of course, is that the whole project is being funded by a shadowy bottled-water conglomerate with an eye on the future.
I'm kidding. No bottled water giant would agree to sponsor an unmanned mission on which a lawyer could not be present. But the possibility that there might be water on Mars raises exciting possibilities for the presence of life, as we know it (it might be nasty, brutish and short, but it's all we have).
I find the whole thing staggering
