Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Phoenix, named for the bird that rose from the dead of its own ashes, now is on it's year long mission to travel and eventually land on Mars.  It's not a probe, nor a rover, but a lander.  The main mission will be to land near the arctic region, drill and analyze the contents in a mini lab-like setting.  Naturally, the main questions that most of us are interested in are: 1) can Mars support life and 2) the history of water at that site.

The main thing I see here is the trend to perform more finer grained research as Mars becomes a key target for the expansion of mankind.  Each time we send rovers, probes, landers, etc. we're sending in more sophisticated versions that can provide greater qualities of data to allow us to assess humans moving there.  This is no exception as we need to thrum up more interest in the government and public to get people to want to support future projects like this.

Right now, it kinda seems like we're launching a probe every other year to Mars, so we're yielding quite a number of missions.  I think this effort needs to increase by quadruple, so that we're making better progress.  Unfortunately, the government has practically slit funds for such programs towards wasteful endeavors such as the Iraq war.  Hopefully, in the upcoming election, the next presidential candidate will consider more positive programs that focus on the improvement of quality of life and the expansion of people, rather than the conquering of nations through violence.