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 dBTechno | Pilots report model rocket near plane over Houston KARE - The FBI and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating a close brush between a Continental Airlines jet and a model rocket in the sky over Houston, Texas. Continental airliner buzzed by enthusiast model rocket? FBI: Pilot saw flaming object near Cleveland-bound jet |
 KSFY | VIPIR Weather Call WTKR Your NewsChannel 3 - Entertainment News from AP In the past, warnings were issued to entire counties when dangerous weather threatened. Now, with VIPIR Weather Call, we can match the danger area defined by the National Weather Service with your address. Hot air mass blamed in state storms Storms on Plains, East Coast |
 dBTechno | Toilet aboard International Space Station is broken CrunchGear - Whuh oh. Seems the only toilet on the ISS is busted and they can’t get a plumber out there until next week. Astronauts aboard the space station have been able to impose upon the nearby Russian Soyuz spacecraft, using its limited-capacity toilet in a ... Space Station Toilets Poop Out NASA pullout could cut 'hope' short |
 SlashGear | Via's OpenBook initiative fails at actually being open Ars Technica - By Ryan Paul | Published: May 28, 2008 - 08:45AM CT Chipmaker VIA has announced its new OpenBook Mini-Note reference design, which is a set of "open" specifications for its next-generation ultramobile concept. Via's OpenBook Is Share Alike, If Only On The Outside Via Releases Laptop Design as Open Source |
 ABC2 News | Two-way battle over; cable wins Los Angeles Times - After a couple of years playing hard to get, Sony got into bed with the cable industry Tuesday and embraced CableLabs' tru2way standard for interactive-cable-ready devices. Sony, six cable companies adopt two-way CableCARD tech Sony Plans TVs That Will Eliminate Set-top Boxes |
 dBTechno | Windows 7 Multi-Touch Features Revealed at D6 Appscout - Michael Miller's out in California, covering The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital D6 conference. The highlight of the show thus far has no doubt been the opening conversation between WSJ's Mossberg and Kara Swisher and Microsoft bigwigs, ... Windows 7 demo at D6: Really? That's it? Slow Dissolve: Bill and Steve at the D Conference |
 dBTechno | Intel faces long not very hot summer Register - By Joe Fay → More by this author Intel will leave its OEMs facing a summer drought of new mobile chips after admitting its Centrino update, Montevia, would not appear till August at the earliest. Sad but true, Intel delays Montevina until late summer Intel Centrino 2 chips hit with problems, delays |
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 eFluxMedia | A Quick Peek At Microsoft’s Windows 7 eFluxMedia - By Michael Todd Microsoft decided to offer a demonstration of its new Windows 7 operating system, with more than 20 months before its scheduled release. Windows 7 Won't Have Compact "MinWin" Kernel Windows 7 to Have Touch-screen Interface |
 dBTechno | Belgian publishers want Google to cough up ZDNet - Belgian publishers are tired of waiting for Google to kick over some bucks (actually, euros will do quite nicely) from a 2006 lawsuit. Belgian Newspapers Sue Google For Copyright Infringement Belgian Newspapers Ask Google for $77.5 Million in Damages |
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LinkThe new paper describes a major advantage to this approach. Traditionally, biological information has been divided between two approaches: data mining, which involves parsing existing information to identify semantic content and connections within it, and curating, which involves expert, manual analysis of data. By importing information from both types of sources, WikiProteins should theoretically contain the best properties of both types of data: reliable information supplied by experts and potential connections among data that haven't previously been explored.
The paper provides a number of measures of the success of this approach. For one, the import process has identified over a million individual authors, and a similar number of concepts that connect them and the other items stored in the database. The different data sources also seem to have paid off, as the authors determined that well over half of the protein-protein interactions brought in from curated databases could not have been identified by data-mining PubMed abstracts.
In calling for biologists to get involved in the beta process, the people who generated WikiProteins have a number of roles in mind. For starters, they expect that the data mining process has generated a significant number of spurious connections, and hope that the community will help in pruning those. For example, they noted that the gene abbreviation "CLB2" mapped to at least five different genes (depending on the organism), as well as a material used in dentistry, Clearfil Liner Bond 2; manual intervention may be needed to sort these out. They're also hoping that contributors will simply dump sentences from the literature into WikiProteins in order for them to be indexed and further connections mined.
If you only watch one 11-minute YouTube of anime music accompanied by custom Mario levels today, make it this one.
Link
(via Waxy!)
This model took five months to complete and cost approximately $200,000. It was built in an old blimp hangar once used by the U. S. Army balloon corps and covers a ground area 75×225 feet, representing the most extravagant effort yet conceived by the American cinema industry.LinkLofty office buildings 250 stories high, canals carried overhead on suspension cables, airplanes that land on a few square feet of flat space on the side of tall structures, streets with nine lanes and nine levels of traffic, are among the interesting features. Although the model city is futuristic, its construction violates no engineering practices. It is really engineering skill carried a bit farther than today.
 Canada.com | Google Opens Google App Engine eWeek - By Darryl K. Taft SAN FRANCISCO--At the Google I/O developer conference here, Google plans to announce new open signups, pricing plans and new APIs for the Google App Engine. Google’s Highly Anticipated I/O Conference Starts Today Google modernizes Web software tool |
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Danny O'Brien of the EFF says,
Tsering Woeser, the prominent Tibetan poet and blogger, has been under attack from the Chinese nationalist hacker team Honker Union. Her Skype account has been broken into, and now other dissidents are being contacted by people pretending to be Woeser.Link (thanks, also, Han Shan).Please stop any communication with “Degewa” on Skype, delete or lock out this user’s name from your Skype account, warn anyone you know who might try to contact me through Skype, tell them to cease contact with “Degewa.” From now on, if you receive any Skype message from “me” in any other users’ name, please speak first (Tibetan friends, please speak in Tibetan) to verify “my identity.” If the other side of the contact refuses to talk, it means you are not in touch with me.Many dissidents across the world use Skype for communications because of its (closed and unaudited) encryption; it's worth remembering that even if the channel is protected, the person on the other end may not be who you think it is.
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In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, Cory Doctorow checks in from his ongoing book tour for "Little Brother," and reads a passage from this latest novel. We also learn all about the contents of his hotel minibar, and a cool steampunk watch he received which shoots cockroaches accross the room.
Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.
Previously on Boing Boing tv:
* Cory Doctorow: Show us your "Little Brother" HOWTO videos, and "Dumpster-Diving Philosopher."
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I'm looking forward to the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe videogame. I'm not looking forward to playing it, as such. I'm not really into fighting games, mostly because they have these huge lists of moves that I feel I have to memorize in order to get anywhere. The actual game ends up like an extremely fast, violent trivia contest:
"For 45 Hit Points: What is the proper response when your opponent is launching a Double Chainsaw Uppercut Blast?"
"Well, Bob, I believe the answer would be GAAAARGH GOODBYE STERNUM I'LL MISS YOU!"
So while I'm probably not going to buy the game, I am looking forward to it existing as an actual product in the real universe, because the whole concept is nose-pokingly ludicrous.
To begin with, there's Superman.
Superman-based interactive entertainment products tend to be very bad, because an accurate Superman game would have one button labeled "Use Powers" and you would press it and win.
With the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC videogame on the horizon, you may be asking everyone around you, "I wonder what other matchups would make for a good fighting game?"
How long is Sub-Zero going to stand up against someone who can picnic on Pluto? Even considering that Subby's powers are magic, and thus can actually affect Superman, then all Supes has to do is fly into the upper atmosphere (Up, Up, High Punch) and fry Zero with his heat vision from 50 miles away (Down, Back, Down, Low Kick, Give Opponent the Finger). From Sub-Zero to Well-Done in eight seconds flat.
Yeah, some of the Mortal Kombat characters are gods and stuff, but the fact remains that they can be torn in half by a movie star, a vulnerability that is not on Superman's bizarre list of weaknesses.
But that's great! I'm tired of reasonable matches. I was exhausted by Enterprise vs. Imperial Star Destroyer arguments 10 years ago, but I'm terribly amused by the idea of an Imperial Star Destroyer against, say, the Kon-Tiki. Especially if you can figure out a scenario in which the raft wins.
So let's make this happen! I desire an endless series of videogames that pit an overpowered team against hapless underdogs! Here are a few to get you started, game-designing people.
If a guy named "Reptile" has a chance against any given member of the Justice League, then Australia's crowd-mooningest rockers should have a shot as well. Just as it looks like Angus Young is down for the count, he can use his ultimate final move: YouTube AMV Barrage! Nobody can stand up to dozens of crappy homemade videos for "Highway to Hell"!
Old version, new version, banned Penny Arcade version, whatever. I just want to see Plum Puddin' take on M. Bison. I also want them to come out with a series of scented Street Fighter dolls. Zangief smells like jellied veal!
This is a game that I would definitely play, but not against other people, or for that matter against the computer. I would just set Tom Nook up as the second character and have him stand there, then I'd play Astaroth and slice him into Tanuki Patties over and over again. Here's your mortgage payment, Nook! I'll just make the check out to "Pulpy Mass of Laceractions!"
Who will win the battle? An undead ninja or a middle-age, cowering cashier? Can Raiden possibly stand up to the awesome power of a catatonic bag boy? If you can beat all the main characters, you finally face down the big boss: the lifeless corpse of Barney Kroger!
Seriously guy, shut up.
- - -
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a street fighter, a street sweeper and a streetwalker.
585 B.C.: A solar eclipse in Asia Minor brings an abrupt halt to a battle, as the warring armies lay down their arms and declare a truce. Historical astronomy later sets a likely date, providing a debatable calculation point for pinning down some dates in ancient history.
This was not the first recorded solar eclipse. After failing to predict one such in 2300 B.C., two Chinese astrologers attached to the emperor's court were soon detached from their heads. Clay tablets from Babylon record an eclipse in Ugarit in 1375 B.C. Later records identify total solar eclipses that "turned day into night" in 1063 and 763 B.C.
But the 585 B.C. eclipse was the first we know that was predicted. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Thales of Milete predicted an eclipse in a year when the Medians and the Lydians were at war. Using the same calculating methods that predict future eclipses, astronomers have been able to calculate when eclipses occurred in the past. You can run the planetary clock in reverse as well as forward. To coin a word, you can postdict as well as predict.
The most likely candidate for Thales' eclipse took place on May 28, 585 B.C., though some authorities believe it may have been 25 years earlier in 610 B.C. Hundreds of scholars have debated this for nearly two millenniums.
Predicting a solar eclipse is not easy. You need to calculate not only when it will happen, but where it will be visible. In a lunar eclipse, when the moon passes through the Earth's huge sun shadow, the event is visible on the whole side of the Earth that's in nighttime, and totality often lasts more than an hour. But in a solar eclipse, the moon's shadow falls across the Earth in a relatively narrow path, and the maximum duration of totality at any given place is only about 7½ minutes.
So you need to know the moon's orbit in great detail -- within a small fraction of a degree of arc. The early Greeks did not have this data.
We do not know the method Thales used to make his prediction. The method may have been used only once, because we have no other records of the Greeks of this era accurately predicting further eclipses. Thales is believed to have studied the Egyptians' techniques of land measurement (geo metry in Greek) later codified by Euclid. One has to wonder whether Thales made the famous eclipse prediction himself, or if he simply borrowed it from the Egyptians.
However he made the prediction, and however precise or vague it may have been, the eclipse occurred. Aylattes, the king of Lydia, was battling Cyaxares, king of the Medes, probably near the River Halys in what is now central Turkey.
The heavens darkened. Soldiers of both kings put down their weapons. The battle was over. And so was the war.
After 15 years of back-and-forth fighting between the Medes and the Lydians, the kings of Cilicia and Babylon intervened and negotiated a treaty. The River Halys, where the Battle of the Eclipse was fought, became the border between the Lydians and the Medes.
Source: NASA, Crystalinks
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Dear Orson and Zoe,
Fifteen years ago, when your mom and I started Wired, you weren't even born. And now look at you — you guys were playing Go Fish with the original crew at the magazine's 15th anniversary party.
Back in 1993, we had only the slightest glimmer of what the Internet would eventually become. But we had a very clear idea what Wired was supposed to be about: the people, companies, and ideas driving the Digital Revolution. The results of that revolution — Googling your homework, iChatting with your cousins in Paris, buying your Lego NXT off eBay — seem like so much background noise to you now, but back then it was a big deal. In the very first issue, I wrote, "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon."
Got a lot of grief for that typhoon reference — as if it were a pretentious exaggeration instead of the understatement it turned out to be. Should have said the Digital Revolution was ripping through our lives like the meteor that extinguished the dinosaurs. Practically every institution that our society is based on, from the local to the supranational, is being rendered obsolete. This is the world you are inheriting.
Louis Rossetto, the founder and former publisher of Wired, tells how the magazine was formed out of San Francisco's early '90s digital underground.
We at Wired saw it coming, because our mission was to connect our readers to the reality of our times. It's the evolutionary function of media: Those individuals/tribes/societies that are most connected to the larger world, as it really is, are most likely to survive and thrive — and move on to the next level in the big game of life. We were successful as an enterprise not because we used eye-popping fluorescent colors (although that didn't hurt) but because we did the hard work of accurately describing the world as it was changing. Of course, we didn't get everything right.
1. The End of History
Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that history ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. The future would be characterized not by the literal but only the figurative war of ideas. We believed him.
We were wrong. Wired failed to see how a new generation of fanatical geeks would use the Internet in their effort to take over the world. Instead of ending, history looped back on itself, and we are now confronted by a recrudescent and particularly virulent religious ideology straight out of the Middle Ages.
We recognized a world in transition, but we missed the danger in front of us. We eschewed conventional wisdom, but we couldn't escape it. Takeaway: Be contrarian, and then be contrarian again.
2. The Death of Media
We predicted the demise of what we called Old Media (aka mainstream/lamestream/dinosaur media) over and over again, and yet it's still alive. True, we said the Internet would erode Old Media's monopoly on interpreting reality, and we were right about that: If you're surfing Boing Boing, you're not reading the paper edition of The New York Times. The result is imploding Old Media and exploding Google ad revenue.
But we underestimated how slowly Old Media would auger in — and how irresponsible it would become in its death throes. As John Perry Barlow put it on our first TV show, the purpose of media isn't, ultimately, to inform; it's to sell our eyeballs to advertisers. And how better to do that — if your monopoly is being eroded by this newfangled Internet — than to scare the shit out of us? Then we're so paralyzed that we stick around through the commercials.
Faced with fierce competition for those eyeballs, Old Media is hawking the apocalypse: The world is inundated by war, poverty, destruction, fascist Republicans! It's about to be swept away by tidal waves unleashed by melting polar ice caps! More on how this is humanity's own fault — after the break.
Wired Promo From 1993: This publicly aired promotion for Wired in its debut year, 1993, shows a style that was frantic but advanced for its time, swiftly conveying the mission and content of the magazine.
3. The Death of Politics
We envisioned the eclipse of the nation-state. Electronic networks were enabling the friction-free movement of capital and ideas. This would take power out of the hands of politicians and bureaucrats and put it in the hands of super-empowered individuals and networked communities.
Wrong. Governments are still here, presumptuous and bossy as ever. And what's worse, although the zoo door was pried open and the monkeys peered out, we chose not to step into the brave new tomorrow, preferring to go on playing games inside our cage.
So instead of spending a decade rebuilding civil society — reinventing how we resolve conflicts and build consensus — we got MoveOn and Daily Kos and Soros-funded 527s that divert immense energy into the mud of politics, all in the naked pursuit of political power. This has resulted in one of the most toxic and least productive eras of public discourse in our history.
1. We Called the Long Boom
In 1997, we published "The Long Boom." Some pundits snarked that it was dotcom-stock boosterism. Instead, it pinpointed what was behind the unprecedented increase in material well-being for most of humanity: the spread of liberal democracy, globalization, and technological revolutions. The boom began with the introduction of the personal computer, and it will continue until at least 2020, when you two might have kids of your own.
Skeptical? Recent reports say that illiteracy worldwide has fallen by half since 1970 and is now at an all-time low of 18 percent; more people live in free countries than ever before; the number of armed conflicts worldwide has declined by almost half since the early '90s. Indeed, the average human born in 2025 will live to be 73 — 25 years longer than one born in 1955.
There's a lot of noise in the media about how the world is going to hell. Remember, the truth is out there, and it's not necessarily what the politicians, priests, or pundits are telling you.
Wired Promo From 1997: A later promotional video from 1997 features some of the big players, such as co-publisher Jane Metcalfe, cofounder Louis Rossetto, executive editor Kevin Kelly, designers John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, deputy editor John Bartelle, and associate publisher Drew Schutte, discussing the challenges and rewards of putting out the magazine.
2. We Foresaw the One Machine
We didn't name it; founding executive editor Kevin Kelly came up with the term only recently. But we certainly predicted a new planetary consciousness based on humans using ever-more-powerful PCs and networks. Take our current hardware/wetware mashup: 1 billion CPUs on the Internet; 8 terabytes of traffic with 2 million emails per second; 3 billion cell phone users; 264 exabytes of magnetic storage. The One Machine now has a million times as many transistors as your brain has neurons. Let's say that gives it processing power equivalent to a single human brain — 1 HB; by 2040, the One Machine should surpass 6 billion HB, exceeding the processing power of humanity. In an era when even progressives are trying to stop time to preserve some notion of planetary perfection, it's clarifying (and humbling) to note that evolution has not ceased — and that we are not evolution's ultimate product.
3. We Knew Tech Would Change How We Relate
We wrote about how every institution — businesses, schools, churches, the courts — was being pounded to obsolescence by the Digital Revolution. So we stressed the need to join together and not just vote but directly rebuild civic society — how we live together as human beings — for the 21st century.
We tried to describe new ways of relating to one another — how we do business, how we invest, how we can defend, educate, cure, shelter, and govern ourselves. We coined the term Netizen to describe this new social actor. We invented the Digital Nation, the Netizens' new homeland. And we championed new heroes, chronicled new successes, and encouraged those struggling to create this new world.
Millennial Moments: In an unusual, Zen-like campaign, Wired tells us, "This is the age where you can finally do it all."
Fair trade, the organic movement, pressure on manufacturers to improve conditions for their workers overseas, blogging, social networks, Surfrider Foundation, One Economy, Amnesty International, One Laptop per Child, networked homeschooling, cracking the human genome, YouTube social media as a means of creating new political consciousness, distributed artistic expression, up to and including the One Machine — these are all reinventions of the institutions we rely on as social animals.
If Wired was the Scout for a generation, Kevin Kelly was the scout for Wired. One chewy chunk of fresh kill he brought back early on was a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called Generations. It concluded its generational history of the United States with the Millennials, members of the next major demographic cohort, the first of whom were born around 1980.
Strauss and Howe's description of Millennials inspired us: "This generation will show more teamlike spirit and more like-mindedness in action than most Americans then alive will recall ever having seen in young people... Millennials will carry out whatever crisis mission they are assigned — as long as they can connect it with their own secular blueprint for progress. If crisis brings war, soldiers will obey orders without complaint. If it involves environmental danger or natural resource depletion, young scientists will make historic breakthroughs. If the crisis is mostly economic, the youthful labor force will be a mighty engine of renewed American prosperity. Whatever their elder-bestowed mission, these rising youths will not disappoint. Assuming the crisis turns out well, Millennials will be forever honored as a generation of civic achievers."
One of the original visionaries of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, reflects on where it all started and how it's evolved in 15 years.
What's heartening to me, Orson and Zoe, is that even though you and your peers have grown up watching your parents become self-absorbed, hypocritical, and now plain crotchety and rancorous (not Jane and me, of course), and even if you stand in the rubble of the social institutions toppled by the Digital Revolution, your response is not the me-me-me of your parents' generation but us-us-us. Whether you're addressing climate change or serving in Iraq, you are simultaneously more traditionalist and future-forward, more practical and idealistic, than your parents.
The challenge is obvious, the dangers present, the need great. But be optimistic. I would say that, wouldn't I, since we were often accused during my time at Wired of being overly optimistic. But optimism is not false hope, it's a strategy for living. If you are optimistic about the future, you will step up and take responsibility and attempt to make it better for yourselves and your own children.
Yes, we didn't know it at the time, but we were making Wired for you.
All love, Dad
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: The Phoenix Mars Lander, which completed a heart-stopping, autonomous landing on the Martian surface on Sunday, has begun beaming pictures the millions of miles back to Earth.
If you missed the landing, this gallery should provide a photographic catch-up on a mission that is likely to allow scientists to examine extraterrestrial water for the first time ever during this initial exploration of a Martian polar region.
Now that the lander is in position, NASA will use the craft's robotic arm to dig into the red planet's regolith to look for the subsurface ice that scientists believe exists there. If they find it, instruments aboard the craft will melt the ice and analyze the water to look for organic compounds, which contain carbon, the building block of life.
These photos take an amazing path to get to your desktop. First, the Surface Stereoscopic Imager snaps them. Then the Lander sends data at about 15 kilobytes a second via an UHF antenna to two spacecraft orbiting Mars. The orbiters relay the data to NASA's Deep Space Network antenna arrays in Canberra Australia, Madrid, and in California's Mojave Desert.
Raw images are sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and posted to the Phoenix Mars Mission website.
Left: The small blue object in the center of the Martian Arctic plain pictured is NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, as seen from above by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The lander touched down safely and scientists have been delighted to find all its instruments in working order. Now, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona scientists will race to do as much research as possible over the next three months before the Martian winter incapacitates the lander.
: This image shows where the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in the desolate northern polar region of Mars. The region was targeted as part of NASA's long-stated "follow the water" exploration strategy for Mars. Scientists believe that ice exists underneath the flat surface of this plain. The "polygonal cracking" visible in the picture has also been observed in permafrost terrains like the Siberian tundra, so scientists believe it results from seasonal freezing and thawing of surface ice.
: While the Mars Phoenix Lander does not have a true video camera, NASA scientists can pan around a very high resolution image to create a video like this one of the Martian arctic plain.
: In a space-exploration first, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Phoenix Lander, and its parachute, during its descent to the Martian surface. It marks the first time that a spacecraft has visualized the descent of another craft.
After two previous landers were lost entering the Martian atmosphere, the Phoenix mission has gone smoothly.
: In an image that has circulated around the world, this picture shows one of the Phoenix Mars Lander's "feet" settled on Martian rock and soil. It was essential that the craft land in an area where it could dig into the soil because the lander, unlike the Mars rovers, can't move. It appears that the area within the lander's reach -- a mere 160 square feet -- will provide scientists with their shot at touching Martian ice.
:
The lander touched down at 4:53 pm Pacific Time on May 25 in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis. Some scientists believe the area was once covered with water in the distant Martian past. Now, it features polygonal patterns that look similar to icy ground in earth's arctic regions.
This image was one of the first color images released by NASA.
: After nine months and 422 million miles of travel, the lander reached the ground near its intended touchdown spot. The Martian landscape around the landing site is barren except for small pebbles and polygonal lumps that are widely associated with permafrost regions on Earth.
: Here we see one of the Phoenix Mars Lander's octagonal solar panels. After it touches down, the two panels unfold on either side of the spacecraft to unveil a total solar-cell area of 45 square feet. The panels are the sole means the craft has of recharging its two 25-amp-hour lithium-ion batteries. Each battery stores about five times as much power as your correspondent's MacBook battery, so the lander has about 10 MacBooks' worth of stored power.
: This image shows a small-scale polygonal pattern in the ground near NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. It was acquired on what NASA is calling Sol 0, the first Martian day of the mission.
While the rocky, lifeless surface is similar to images delivered by the Mars rovers, scientists believe the warping of the land is due to water ice under the surface. The prospective ice has raised hopes that some liquid water, which is required for life as we know it, exists under the surface.
"There's this idea that there are reservoirs of liquid water down there and as soon as you see liquid water, you say, 'Why couldn't there be microbes?'" Edward Young, the principal investigator of the UCLA IGPP Center for Astrobiology, told Wired.com. (Young is not involved with the Phoenix mission.)
: Mars is roughly half the size of Earth, yet the Phoenix Mars Lander will only end up excavating a tiny living room-sized slice of the planet. Still, the lander is loaded with a variety of instruments, including a gas analyzer and a weather station, that scientists hope will turn this barren landscape into a rich scientific tapestry that adds whole new chapters to what we know about Mars, the rest of the solar system and the possibility for life on other planets.
: After a decade of tough luck for Martian missions, Phoenix team members celebrate the craft's landing on Mars, May 25, 2008. Wired.com brought you live coverage of the team's giddy press conference.
This image is a screen capture taken from NASA TV just after radio signals were received from the lander.
: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaNow, with the initial excitement of the landing over, the Phoenix team is settling in to do the heavy scientific lifting that got the mission $420 million in funding. Digging for ice could begin as early as next week, and that investigation could provide a host of surprises about the history of the water and life on Mars.
Like previous missions, the Phoenix Mars Lander has a message for future Martian explorers in the form of the mini-DVD that you see next to the American flag. It was created by the Planetary Society and contains video of Earth's visionaries like Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke talking about the future. For the earthbound present, NASA has embraced Twitter to send out status messages on the mission. The Mars Phoenix Twitter stream has amassed almost 8,000 followers.
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