Phoenix has landed!

Geeks everywhere rejoice!

And I count myself among their number. This is a really big deal, especially given that about half of the Mars missions to date have failed for one reason or another. To the more sensitive taxpayers among us, that is a terrible failure rate, but in reality, it's amazing. Think of it -- sending an object smaller than your car across interplanetary space, getting it to land just where you want it with no way to physically fix anything which may have broken during flight and due to the fifteen-minute lag in radio signal, no way to course-correct once it's entered the atmosphere.

Phoenix will not tell us whether or not there is life -- the microbial version -- currently extant on Mars, but it will tell us if there might once have been. You hear a lot about the big scientific discoveries, but what most people don't realize is these almost arise de novo. They are nearly always preceded by a lot of minor discoveries, work without which the big stuff could not have been found. Calibration is everything in science, and Phoenix should give us a lot to work with.

Is there life on Mars right now? Obviously, I don't know but I will say it wouldn't surprise me. It's bacterial in nature, if it does exist, and bacteria are persistent little critters. They're everywhere, including arctic regions of our planet which are very much like the arctic regions of Mars.

And if there is life there, what then? I agree with the late Carl Sagan. If there is life on Mars, even of the simplest kind, then it's hands-off. Mars belongs to the Martians.

Elle