The rover is likely to be a copy - in terms of size - of Nasa's Curiosity-Mars Science Laboratory rover, which is due to launch in November.
The heroes of Mr Morton's book are the astronomers who yearn to solve Mars's scientific puzzles, the science-fiction writers who project their politics on to Mars's blank canvas, and the space-flight enthusiasts who dream of Martian colonies.
Beside its direct scientific role, Mars Odyssey is also an important link in America's Mars-exploration programme.
In the most steely-nerved foreign firms such as McDonald's, Mars and Coca-Cola, there are therefore flashes of optimism.
The Sun enters Scorpio and aspects every slower planet except Pluto, and there's an intense Mars-Jupiter opposition.
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The instruments on board Venus Express had been developed as back-ups for either Esa's Mars Express spacecraft or Esa's comet-chaser mission, Rosetta, due for launch in January.
The mission is also notable because China's first Mars satellite, Yinghuo-1, has been launched piggy-back on the main Russian spacecraft.
Micro-organisms on Earth are much more common in fresh water than acidic water, and so rather than Mars just having been a potential haven for some extreme forms of life, Curiosity's discovery means that Mars had -- and still preserves evidence of -- environments that were habitable for an enormous variety of micro-organisms that thrive on our own planet.
Mars-Jones's prize included a golden hatchet buried in a book-shaped cake.
Mr. McCOLLOM: We now have this tremendous data set that's being returned by the Mars rover that--I mean, we wouldn't have any debates if that data wasn't there.
In combination with Cadbury, the world's second-largest sweetmaker, it would challenge Mars-Wrigley for top spot and add strong businesses in rich countries such as Britain and Australia as well as faster-growing developing countries like India, Brazil and Mexico.
Mars-Jones attacked Cunningham's prolific use of literary references, noting each quote used from classic novels.
"The test was a resounding success", said Ben Jarvis of the Mars Advanced Rocketry Society (Mars), Britain's longest-running rocketry group.
Kepler is searching for Earth-like planets around far-flung stars, and the Mars Science Laboratory will sample the Red Planet's geology looking for the building blocks of life - though it will not explicitly look for life itself.
Looking like a sportier version of NASA's Mars Rover, the first wireless, Web-connected robot sees, hears and speaks for you.
Not that Bryan Singer has a particularly light touch, and indeed the script's narrative bookends land with a dull thud, but at least the "X-Men" director hasn't succumbed to the self-important bloat that mars Peter Jackson's work these days.
Though rendered banal by years of TV ads lamenting "the heartbreak of psoriasis, " the skin disorder actually is a serious immune disease, affecting 7 million people in the U.S. In more than one-third of patients it mars 10% or more of the body surface (the palm of the hand counts as 1%).
Phonevalley's Alexandre Mars says that both mobile banner ads and text-based campaigns have the advantage of being easy to scale.
"He's promising a trillion-dollar tax cut and a trip to Mars... and he has a half-trillion-dollar deficit, " said Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean.
But perhaps the most important accomplishment of the mission, at least when it comes to long-term Mars exploration, is that NASA's new mantra of building projects "faster, better and cheaper" has proven to be feasible.
Earlier this year, NASA pulled out of an ambitious, joint U.S.-European effort to land a next-generation rover on Mars and eventually return some samples to Earth.
Mars-Jones accepted his prize of a year's supply of potted shrimp at a ceremony in a London pub.
Before Curiosity, NASA's big rover project was the Mars Exploration Rover Mission: two golf-cart-sized rovers called Spirit and Opportunity.
The base will actually be built inside a real crater and the daytime temperature of -23 degrees Celsius is like a nice summer's day on Mars.
Samples from Mars' surface had been ingested into the rover's on-board laboratories last month.
RealD's cutting-edge 3D technologies have been used for applications such as piloting the Mars Rover, heads-up displays for military jets and robotic medical procedures.
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In a section on water in outer space we learn that there is a lake-size layer of ice on the moon's south pole, that Mars once had rivers, that there is steam in the sun's atmosphere.
Not a lot to smile about at Dodger Stadium except a Korean pitcher named Hyun-Jin Ryu who looks good and a Korean entertainer named Psy who comes to a game to dance in the aisles between innings while a wide-eyed Tommy Lasorda looks at him like he's a man from Mars.
When McPherson wasn't answering questions about Katie Holmes' guest turn on sophomore drama Eli Stone, he focused on the fall's two newcomers: Life on Mars, a British remake about a modern-day police detective who wakes up 35 years in the past, and Opportunity Knocks, a chance-of-a-lifetime game show from star Ashton Kutcher.
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