Life on Mars

Glaciers, half a mile thick and tens of miles long, have been identified on Mars, Science magazine reported yesterday. The presence of ice on the red planet was known, but it is the first time such quantities have been identified away from the poles. Already Nasa is speculating that they could provide water for future missions. But for every step forward in space there is one back, and the robotic lander Phoenix has returned to the ashes. After nearly six months of the Martian summer spent exploring the northern plains and scooping up handfuls - clawfuls? - of permafrosted soil, Phoenix's search for organic molecules that could just prove beyond doubt that there had once been life there has been abandoned. Overwhelmed by dust and the low light from the winter sun, no signals have been received for a fortnight. The lander has run out of puff. There is a glimmer of a chance that the next Martian summer, almost a year away in Earth terms, may provide enough light and warmth to breathe new energy into it. But Nasa has said goodbye.

Another phase in the great Mars adventure has ended, and in this belt-tightening age there will be some who doubt that the millions of dollars and euros, Russian roubles and Chinese yuan are well spent. The answer, as MEPs agreed earlier this week, is that they are. While all scientific inquiry is capable of turning up the most unexpected discoveries, every step of every space mission requires innovation and improvisation and speculation that leads to new industrial or medical processes. Phoenix, for example, landed with eight specific experiments to undertake and performed only one to the satisfaction of the scientists. Yet by landing safely at all, using an entirely new method that relied on a responsive system of hazard detection and avoidance, another advance was made. Technology from the great British experiment five years ago, the ill-starred Beagle 2 - it declined to call home, its inventor Colin Pillinger recently lamented - is now being used by the Wellcome Trust in the early detection of TB.

The enthusiasm for space exploration is, if anything, growing keener as the world's emerging economies join in. Early next week European ministers meet to discuss doubling the cash available for the space programme to €1.2bn. Enthusiastically supported by the French presidency, there is talk of cooperation with Russia and the US on the exploration of the Martian moon Phobos, and developing the EU's capacity to build its own robotic lander. Meanwhile a British team is making progress developing a shield against solar storms, which will be indispensable, it is said, when the day finally arrives that man lands on Mars.