Word: soils
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America seems to have a fascination with the underdog--at least when the underdog isn't urinating on its own soil. So when the Palestinians erupted in bullets and stones against the authority of the State of Israel this week in outrage over the completion of a tourist tunnel, they garnered much sympathy from the American press and pundits. (The fretting of the State Department was but its manifest agony at the breakdown of an imperialist grand plan...
Hurtling in from space some 16 million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into the dusty surface of Mars and exploded with more power than a million hydrogen bombs, gouging a deep crater in the planet's crust and lofting huge quantities of rock and soil into the thin Martian atmosphere. While most of the debris fell back to the surface, some of the rocks, fired upward by the blast at high velocities, escaped the weak tug of Martian gravity and entered into orbits of their own around...
...goes well with these flights, as many as four more pairs will follow at two-year intervals beginning in December 1998. Though the second lander will not be as mobile as Pathfinder, it will have an improved stereoscopic camera and a robotic shovel, allowing it to scoop up soil and conduct more detailed studies of its chemical composition. Unfortunately, none of these ships is designed to test for what captured the world's imagination last week: Martian life...
...will open like the petals of a 3-ft.-tall flower to reveal a six-wheeled rover. Powered by solar cells and D-cell batteries, the 2-ft.-long robot vehicle is supposed to hum away from the landing pod, crawling at 2 ft. a minute, and sample the soil for several weeks--or until its batteries...
...Sure, if we got lucky, dug into the soil and came up with a little plant, we could detect that," says Norm Haynes, director of the Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "But there's nothing we can send from Earth that can even begin to duplicate what the people who studied the Martian meteorite...