Word: phoenixes
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...polar bear either. But that doesn't mean there aren't interesting things going on in the planet's polar regions. Life requires water, after all, and water - at least in the form of ice - is found in abundance at the poles. That's why the Mars Phoenix lander is en route to pay a call there, with a first ever touchdown in the Martian Arctic set for this Sunday...
...Mars Phoenix is just the latest in a small fleet of relatively inexpensive spacecraft (a few hundred million dollars apiece, which is tag-sale prices by spaceship standards) NASA has launched toward Mars in the last dozen years. The Mars Express and Mars Odyssey orbiters have done the true yeoman's work, extensively mapping the planet from high overhead. The Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity rovers have made the headlines, toddling around in the soil of the Red Planet and sending back portfolios of pictures. But it's Phoenix that could make the most thrilling discoveries...
...know, was once a very wet planet, running with rivers and teeming with oceans and seas much like the Earth. But its low gravity and thin atmosphere allowed most of that water to vanish into space. What was left retreated into the subsoil or, significantly, contracted into the poles. Phoenix, a stationary lander in the style of the old Viking ships that touched down on the planet in 1976, will get a chance to dig into that frozen polar rind...
Unlike the rovers, which relied on almost comical but remarkably reliable airbags to bounce down on the surface, Phoenix will use the braking-rocket and foot-pad technique pioneered by the Viking and lunar Surveyor probes. Once on the surface, it will deploy a suite of scientific instruments to study the terrain around it: stereoscopic cameras, microscopic imagers, electrochemistry analyzers, meteorological sensors. Most dramatically, it will also unstow and flex a powerful, 8-ft. (2.35-m) robotic arm, equipped with a camera...
...Ignored and unloved anywhere but in France, the Brooklyn-based director turns from tortured crime movies (The Yards, We Own the Night) to a story of romantic obsession: after a couple of suicide attempts, a young man (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a troubled rich girl (Gwyneth Paltrow) rather than the nice girl (Vinessa Shaw) his parents want him to marry. This is one long toothache of a movie, painfully earnest, not preposterous enough to be enjoyed as camp, and a waste of some very good actors. The Paris critics called Two Lovers "sublime," which sounds even better...