Free Republic

On 25 May, it will be five years since Nasa's robotic spacecraft Phoenix touched down in the Martian "arctic". Here, Dr Tom Pike, one of the mission scientists on Phoenix, explains what we've learnt about the Red Planet in that time. I'm tightly sandwiched between missions to Mars. I'm still analysing data from Phoenix, while building hardware for the seismometers launching on InSight. In my spare time, I like to keep an eye on the data coming down from Curiosity. Although workdays and weekends are rather blurred, there are some dates I take great care to remember. Five years ago...

We had four witnesses with maybe 150 to 200 years of combined space experience appearing before the subcommittee on space on Tuesday (May 21), each with a plan. - Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society (who co-led the co-leader of the Keck Institute for Space Studies Asteroid Retrieval Mission Study): Do the asteroid mission proposed by NASA. It will launch four to five years from now. If done properly, it would be a great opportunity for humans to explore as well as for commercial opportunities in mining. - Paul Spudis, senior staff scientist at the NASA-funded Lunar...