After an epic nine-month journey through space, the NASA probe Phoenix has landed safely on Mars – the first spacecraft to land in the Martian arctic. After travelling 679-million kilometres, Phoenix entered the Martian atmosphere beginning a perilous descent at 21,000 kilometres per hour. As water only exists on Mars now in the form of ice and vapour one of the probe’s objectives is to examine the history of water that might have existed in liquid form in the arctic region as recently as 100,000 years ago.

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