martian landscape

If you roll out of bed and see the headline "Life on Mars," is it because: a) it's a hoax, b) NASA got lucky, c) scientific genius won out, or d) it is written in a British tabloid?

Yesterday, NASA released more than two thousand images from the high-resolution camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft looping around the Red Planet. One of the highlight photos, taken February 19, shows the cloudy aftermath of an avalanche of ice and dust rushing down a steep slope. The image surprised scientists, and proved that Mars is not just some planet-sized museum, but a very active world.

The twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have observed more than 4,000 geographical features on the planet since they landed in January 2004. Expected to run for only three months, the rovers are still going strong, and their mission has now been extended to at least September of next year. They've been ranging for so long, in fact, that they're causing a problem for their handlers. In order to document the terrain efficiently, scientists have had to come up with unique names for all the features the rovers discover, a task that gets tougher with each passing day.