Word: planeteers
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...reach. Yet to take them from the research phase into widespread use will require major investments, both public and private. When it comes to climate change, President George W. Bush's greatest failure is that he dithered for eight years instead of investing in new technologies for a sustainable planet...
...which would be fine if Blair were, say, a U.S. politician-and so expected to profess his faith even if he didn't have much of one. But, at least in its public aspect, Britain is one of the most aggressively secular societies on the planet. Though Blair went to lengths not to make a big deal of his faith when in office ("We don't do God," Campbell once said, though he now insists he did so only to get rid of a journalist who had overrun his allotted time), that did not stop the British from making...
...NASA should be so lucky as to find a button-nosed snowman in the Martian arctic. A more serious hope is that the $557 million Phoenix will help determine whether organic life is possible on the planet by securing the first sample of Martian ice for testing. Although images of the landing site, a nearly featureless plain marked by polygon-shaped cracks, may not dazzle jaded space buffs, scientists are thrilled. "I know it looks like a parking lot," said principal investigator Peter Smith, "but there's ice under that surface. This is a scientist's dream...
...days, following system checks and the capture of hundreds of images from stereoscopic cameras, the stationary probe will begin its search for frozen water. Scientists say Mars was once flush with rivers and lakes, but most of the water escaped into space due to the planet's low gravity and thin atmosphere. What's left is believed to be concentrated at the poles. Phoenix will soon begin digging for it, extending an 8 ft. (2.35 m) robotic arm outfitted with a movable scoop. First, however, scientists will use landing-site images to build a virtual 3-D computer...
...Phoenix Lander is something of a make-good for the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander (MPL), which crashed near the south pole in 1999. The two spacecraft share the same design and Phoenix was originally headed to the planet as Mars Surveyor 2001 until the MPL crash prompted NASA to mothball the project. After correcting several design flaws, NASA resurrected Surveyor as the Mars Phoenix Lander. The space agency, which spent $100 million on Surveyor, has invested another $420 million in the improved vehicle. The Canadian Space Agency contributed another $37 million for a weather station...