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Published online 6 May 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/453142a
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Phoenix descending
NASA's Mars strategy goes from "follow the water" to "arrive at the ice".
Since 2001, the slogan for NASA’s Mars programme has been “follow the water”.
With Phoenix, a US$420-million mission to the edge of the planet’s north ice cap, the agency hopes to finally touch its quarry, in the form of dirty water ice scraped from the subsurface and melted in the probe’s on-board ovens.
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People are living in a dream world if they think there is any chance of establishing permanent colonies on Mars. There is a large area on earth with plenty of food, plenty of water, and a benign climate that has been known for almost 200 years. Yet no villages have been established there yet. That place is Antarctica. Only transients mange to stay there for awhile. I suspect that the hydrogen detected in the Martian soil is there as silicones. That would be much more consistent with a climate drier than the Sahara desert.
The objective is to study the possibility of life on Mars, not the possibilities for colonization.