Great, now we can get home

The Los Angeles Times has an article about an unexpected discovery on Mars: "New soil chemistry tests by NASA's Phoenix Mars lander have uncovered evidence of perchlorate, a highly reactive salt found naturally on Earth and used in a variety of products, including fertilizer, fireworks, and rocket fuel, scientists said... On Earth, perchlorate is found most abundantly in the surface soils of Chile's Atacama Desert, which coincidentally has long served as a Martian stand-in for researchers trying to understand conditions on the Red Planet. The 600-mile-long strip of land in Chile is about fifty times drier than Death Valley. Even so, it is not uninhabited. Microbes flourish there, and some life forms even feed on the perchlorate in the soil."

Rico says this is going to get far more interesting as we go along, though he's still waiting for the video of the shadow of something falling across the lander right before the signal goes dead...