A small science probe blazed through the salmon-colored skies of Mars on Sunday, touching down on a frozen desert at the planet’s north pole to search for water and assess conditions for sustaining life, Nasa officials said. It marked the first time that a spacecraft had successfully landed at one of the planet’s polar regions.
Space engineers were on Saturday making their last nervous preparations for the landing of their Phoenix probe near the north pole of Mars next Sunday. The spacecraft — designed to look for reservoirs of water and ice in the Martian arctic — has been built using duplicate parts left over from two previous space missions.