By Mary Houlihan,
All This Is That science editor
-Click to enlarge-
About three weeks after it landed on Mars, the Phoenix lander has transmitted new photographs of geologic features and the planet's surface, including one that appears to show a direct link between earth and Mars.
NASA's $420 million lander may have also located ice in the Martian polar region, in a photo with with rocks and hills trailing into a dusty horizon. Ice, and its parent, water, may be necessary for life, or at least life as we understand it.
"We're getting about twice the data volume we were told to expect," said Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona.
Mary Houlihan, discussed the photograph of what appears to be a butte, or mesa, with a smiley face gouged into the rock and dust: "Of course, the scientists at NASA and JPL have already dismissed the smiley face as a geological anomaly. However, the question may really be 'did they get the smiley face from us, or did we get it from them?'"
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I love Mary Houlihan. You should use her more often!
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That image is, I think, not from Phoenix. It's from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just FYI. :-)
ReplyDeleteWith so few sentences, why use the huge font, as though highlighting key phrase in a magazine or newspaper article? It's kind of funny, in a mocking-magazine-articles kind of way, but it's really a big typographical distraction that gave the punchline away long before the actual joke. Whoever sets up the page has no sense of rhythm or timing. Yeesh. Get someone who knows how to read.
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