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Mars Soil Frustrates Phoenix Again
Tablizer writes "The Phoenix Mars lander has been frustrated yet again by Mars's odd soil. The wet nature of the soil they are targeting appears to have made it get stuck in the scoop rather than drop into the oven. Past problems with similarly clumpy soil may have damaged the lander because the vibrator had to be used longer than it was designed for, resulting in a short circuit."
Mars, apparently. Didn't know he was into that sort of thing. But then he is Roman.
A Phoenix putting something into an oven... there go our tax dollars! Any competent phoenix would wait until its body burst into flame, then use the spare heat to analyze the sample.
I don't know about you, but I intend to write to my Congressperson.
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Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
That's how it goes when they send a vibrator to do a mans job. Anyway, are the exploring that hole they found a while back?
There's got to be a joke in here somewhere....
Mars hasn't had contact with any life forms in hundreds of millions of years, at least. Of course it needed an unusually long time with the vibrator.
Yeah, we could have found out exactly what Martian soil is like beforehand. We should just send up a robot to scoop some up and analyze it...oh wait.
Since I'm a guy and all :)
$ man vibrator
No manual entry for vibrator
Could be worse - it might have been Uranus, after all.
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum."
to which phoenix replies to mars regarding the short circuit: "i swear, this has never happened before..."
Good people go to bed earlier.