Word: polarity
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...scoop, edged with pronglike "ripper tines," is designed to crunch into the tough polar permafrost. NASA's plan is to dig trenches about 19 in. (.5 m) into the surface, a depth where scientists believe ice meets soil, and haul a sample onto the spacecraft. There, an instrument will heat the soil in tiny ovens, checking the resulting vapors for water and carbon compounds. An on-board chemistry lab with dual microscopes will add water to the sample and analyze the spectral and electrochemical results to check acidity, salt levels, and ion concentrations...
...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...
...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...
...white cardboard image of the beloved marsupial was photographed by satellites on May 20 as part of a 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...
...like a sitcom or a doctor soap. An elaborate sci-fi/fantasy thriller about plane-crash survivors stranded on an island, it has told a single, wildly complicated story involving--deep breath--time travel, conspiracies, a monster made of smoke, a utopian experiment gone bad, ghosts, polar bears in the tropics, philosophy, metaphysics and a mystical set of numbers that may have to do with the end of the world...