Tuesday, June 17, 2008





Phoenix Finds No Water on Mars Surface . . . So Far

Scientists are in no way surprised or discouraged about this early result.


I should hope not, considering that we already know that the probe's sitting atop a mother lode of water ice. One begins to wonder why we bothered sending Phoenix to begin with if NASA's consigned it to simply parrot previous discoveries. The public is effectively being asked to marvel at the Phoenix team's engineering savvy at the expense of learning very little of value about the planet being "explored."

Frankly, I'm rapidly losing interest in the Phoenix mission. Achieving a soft landing on Mars was cause for celebration, but it was hardly a first. Without the ability to detect possible metabolic activity, Phoenix seems doomed to serve as little more than a telerobotic placeholder for future missions.

One can only hope that Phoenix's successors will be equipped to tell us something fundamentally new.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mac said, "Phoenix seems doomed to serve as little more than a telerobotic placeholder for future missions."

I hope doomed is not the word we will always remember this mission by.

Michael

Anonymous said...

Update is that NASA is now convinced the white stuff uncovered is indeed ice and not salt. As Mac said though, whoopee do as I thought everyone already was sure there was ice in the polar regions. So when do we start robotically ferry in base camp equipment much as was written in the novel "Red Mars"?

James W Johnston

Mac said...

I still want to know exactly how one "discovers" ice that we already knew was there . . .