Mars today is a world of cold and lonely deserts, apparently without life of any kind, at least on the surface. Worse still, it looks like Mars has been cold and dry for billions of years, with an atmosphere so thin, any liquid water on the surface quickly boils away while the sun's ultraviolet radiation scorches the ground.

A key question is, how did the ice get there in the first place? The tilt of Mars' spin axis sometimes gets much greater than it is now. Climate modeling tells us ice sheets could cover mid-latitude regions of Mars during those high-tilt periods. The buried glaciers make sense as preserved fragments from an ice age millions of years ago. On Earth, such buried glacial ice in Antarctica preserves the record of traces of ancient organisms and past climate history."

Camera on Phoenix Arm Looks Beneath NASA Mars Lander. A view of the ground underneath NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander adds to evidence that descent thrusters dispersed overlying soil and exposed a harder substrate that may be ice.

Phoenix Mars Explorer at 7:54 PM EST successfully landed on planet Mars. Touchdown signal is detected right now as we write this report. NASA reports that "A signal has been detected from Phoenix indicating that the lander is on the surface of Mars."

The historically less-than-50 per cent odds of success loomed heavily as NASA scientists readied for today's landing of the 420-million-dollar Phoenix spacecraft near the frigid north pole of Planet Mars.

NASA released an image that was shot four years ago by Spirit Rover, which shows a man on Mars. Actually it's like a man sitting on Mars sand and waiting for something or looking for something. This has raised many questions such as "is there a life on Mars"?

NASA's newest Mars lander will be carrying the words and arts of visionaries from Voltaire to Carl Sagan when it departs for Mars.