Word: planet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very likely to find a penguin on Mars - or a seal or a puffin or a 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...
...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...
Mars, as scientists now 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...
...best tourist attractions in Burma's new capital. That's no surprise, really. Naypyidaw--the name translates as "Abode of Kings"--was built from scratch just three years ago on orders from the ruling junta. The vast swath of former scrubland didn't even exist when the latest Lonely Planet Burma travel guide was written, and there's not much tourist charm in a dusty bunker town whose sole purpose is the wish fulfillment of paranoid generals...
...multicountry project to study the albedo effect, the amount of sunlight that reflects off Earth's surface. Scientists are gathering data to raise awareness of how the whiteness of the polar ice caps, currently shrinking because of global warming, helps deflect heat from the sun and keep the planet cool...