First pictures of the Martian far north

A Nasa spacecraft has sent back historic first pictures of an unexplored region of Mars.

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth.

The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface.

It will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days.

A signal confirming the lander had reached the surface was received at 2353 GMT on 25 May (1953 EDT; 0053 BST on 26 May).

Engineers and scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California clapped and cheered when the landing signal came through.

"Phoenix has landed - welcome to the northern plain of Mars," a flight controller announced.

The Martian arctic looks pretty much like every other part of Mars that I've seen. But still it is what is below the surface that counts.

Stop and think for a minute about what a great achievement it is to launch something like this from Earth and have it land safely on another planet at the exact time and place that were planed.

I still doubt that the machine will find the firm evidence of life that it was sent to look for, however. That will take human boots on the Martin ground.

How about we take all the money we are wasting by subsidizing ethanol and other global warming fantasies and put it into space exploration. That way we will not only push back the frontiers of human knowledge we will get all kinds of technological spin-offs which just might do something like cure cancer or even give us that cheap and abundant source of pollution free energy the greens want.*

*Actually that's wrong. The greens don't want a cheap and clean source of abundant energy. They want the human population reduced from six billion to a few million who will live at the neolithic level.