We've already seen water ice on Mars. NASA's Phoenix lander will
reach out and touch it. - By Charles Petit - Air & Space
magazine, August 2007 THE SQUARE, EARTH-TONE industrial building
on North Sixth Avenue in Tucson, Arizona, has little of the
proud, high-tech gloss of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
traditional home of U.S. Mars missions. The historic NASA center
in Pasadena, California, has neatly clipped lawns and squadrons
of badge-wearing engineers and scientists, who work each day
surrounded by memorabilia from decades of solar system
exploration. Everything about the place fairly shouts Space
science is our business. But around this building in Tucson’s
commercial flatland, the ambience is quite different: There’s a
car repair shop, a day care center, a small dinosaur museum, and
the hum of passing traffic. The main clue that something unusual
is going on is the exuberant yellow and orange mural painted
along one of the building’s broad sides. The work of art
students from the University of Arizon