Robots Ho!

Spirit and Opportunity: Another Sign of Water on Mars

NASA's Spirit rover has discovered more evidence of water on Mars, a high concentration of salt in a trench dug by the rover in the Gusev Crater region it has been exploring.

"We have found more evidence of salts, more evidence for the action of water — much more compelling evidence than we found anywhere else at Gusev," said principal scientist Steven Squyres of Cornell University.

Cassinni looks at battered Phoebe

The spacecraft Cassini, due to begin exploring Saturn next month, flew within 1,250 miles of the planet's mysterious moon Phoebe at the weekend.
The first pictures sent back show a black, bruised and tiny world, about 125 miles across. Phoebe reflects only about 6% of the sunlight that falls on it.

"This odd moon has a little ice and a lot of black material on its surface but, beyond that, we know very little," said Dale Cruikshank, a Nasa scientist who will use data from the flyby to calculate Phoebe's chemical composition.

The incoming data will take time to interpret. But the closer look at Phoebe has already revealed a brutal history. It is pitted by craters - many overlapping - suggesting that it has been hammered by lumps of rock and ice several hundred metres across.