Could not agree with you more, Carter. Carl’s spirit is in that NASA control room, cheering along with a bunch of kids who just won a big prize.

Never mind the space station and shuttle 220 mile above the earth, this thing has soft-landed on another planet.

Phantastic!

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
Carl Sagan

After a nine-month journey from Earth, the Phoenix probe touched down in a relatively flat target area, according to Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at the mission's control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"For the first time in 32 years, and only the third time in history, a JPL team has carried out a soft landing on Mars ," National Aeronautics and Space Administration head Michael Griffin said in a statement.

"I couldn't be happier to be here to witness this incredible achievement."

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080526/world/us_space_astronomy_mars

Reminds me of the song lyric "you can reach me with your mind:"

You can reach me by rail way, you can reach me by trail way
You can reach me on an airplane, you can reach me with your mind
You can reach me by caravan, 'cross the desert like an Arab man
I don't care how you get here, just get here if you can

Why do we need space craft that is not biodegradable nor sustainable going to another planet in our solar system? Have we not learned our lesson yet?

Why are we not experimenting with travel through inner space of third eye? Where's the interest in spiritual research? Are we still in the old paradigm where spiritual and scientific exploration are separate? There will be a more balanced and sustainable approach when the two opposites meet in the middle.

Trish~~

The timing of the Mars Phoenix Lander arriving on Mars with the vast number of tornadoes which hit the midwest so hard impressed me no end. One thing that disturbs me most of all is that while mankind will spend money for such a trip to Mars, nobody yet has funded money to create a device that can harness all the energy of a tornado which is an annual event. If one could create a Lander on Mars, why is that some inventor has not created a device to capture the energy of a tornado? With so many tornados, this energy saving device could have generated power for many, many cities across America, and perhaps even for fuel for automobiles and trucks, etc.

I am impressed with the cheers of the members of the team who cheered in Pasadena Sunday evening, but I am also well aware of the tears and sorrows of the families who lost their homes to nature's fury.

One cannot argue whether the study of Mars is worthwhile or not simply because it is too soon to tell. The real problem is that not enough money is ever allocated for problems on terra firma, and many nations are suffering now: China, Burma, America, Columbia, etc.etc. The list goes on and on.

But I would challenge any scientist to create a device that could harness the power of the tornado when it crosses the land. It seems to me that cells or chips could be planted somehow to store that power. Why is that not a top project?

Perhaps the weather circumstances on Mars might give us a clue in the (near) future on how to handle exactly that what you ask for arizonasunset.....

As will the scientific investigations performed on our sun at the moment.

As will perhaps the results that come out of that collision in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN within short.

One thing is for sure: Al Gore's report on climate change has set everything in motion on the next spiral level of human intelligence. We have made the jump, we will find new ways and solutions.

Mieke