Having witnessed two Mars lander failures, Mars Polar Lander before this blog was even born and Beagle-2 back when it was young and active (Landing and prelanding in the December 2003 archive, and the whole sad story in the Beagle-2 archive), and having been absent for all the other attempts that have proved successful, it seemed to me only prudent not to cover the landing of Phoenix this weekend (and, yes, the fact that Pete Smith has bribed me heavily not to bring my big dead martian albatross anywhere near his nice shiny mission does play a role in this...).
However my excellent colleague Eric Hand is taking up the challenge -- he's down in Tucson now, embedding himself with Pete's science team, and will be blogging at Nature's In the Field blog. So if this post turns up unexpectedly in your RSS feed (I can't believe anyone looks at a blog this defunct) I advise you to turn your attention to what he has to say...
Oh yes: for more on what it was like to cover the loss of Mars Polar Lander, debates over where to send the spacecraft which eventually became Phoenix, and a few apercus from Pete Smith, and the significance of ice on Mars you could do worse than turn to Mapping Mars, now invitingly cheap at Amazon US and not that much pricier at Amazon UK
Welcome back. The beauty of RSS is that it doesn't matter how many dormant blogs you track. When there's signal, the detectors will fire.
Posted by: Matt Whyndham | June 04, 2008 at 01:17 PM