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The Phoenix Mars Lander's robotic arm touched the planet's terrain for the first time on Saturday.

The effort, which came seven days after the lander touched down, is part of NASA's efforts to scoop up Red Planet specimens for experiments on the lander.

A behemoth "footprint" was left behind by the robotic arm's touch in the King of Hearts area of Mars. The mark, which was captured by the camera attached to the lander, looks like it could have been made by the mythological Himalayan snowman. In reference to this, NASA dubbed the impression area "Yeti."

Here is the 'footprint' left by the lander's robotic arm on Saturday.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizone)

The lander's camera also took more images of the area under the lander, which has been nicknamed the "Snow Queen" site.

Images of the "Snow Queen" site further support NASA scientists' assumptions that the area in and around the lander is composed of ice, according to a statement from Uwe Keller, the robotic arm camera's lead scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

NASA's photos from this latest event in the Phoenix mission also offer a more philosophical thought about the future of space exploration. Man's first "footprint" on Mars was made by a robotic swipe, not a human step.

The Mars Phoenix Lander parachutes down to Mars on Sunday, in this image captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona )

The first images from the Phoenix Mars Lander have confirmed that the solar panels needed for its energy supply unfolded as planned and that masts for its camera and weather station are in position.

A successful touchdown late Sunday was followed by the first pictures about two hours later. More images are expected Monday evening.

This is one of the first images captured by the Phoenix lander, showing the vast plains of the northern polar region of Mars. The image was taken in black and white, with the approximate color inferred from two filters.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

The pictures "show a beautiful Martian landscape," Brent Shockley, Phoenix configuration and information management engineer, wrote in his blog Sunday night.

The landing of NASA's machine concluded a 422-million-mile journey that began last August. The Phoenix is on a three-month mission to determine whether ice below the surface ever thaws and whether some of the chemical ingredients needed for life are preserved in the soil.

"It's liquid water we're looking for," Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona at Tucson and principal investigator for the Phoenix mission, said during a press conference Monday on NASA TV. "Does the ice melt?"

Smith noted that the ground looks like the "active surface of the Arctic regions of Earth." Cracks in the soil show that surface is "active" because no dust or sand has filled in the cracks.

One particularly interesting photo comes from the NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which actually captured the lander as it was parachuting to Mars in the last leg of its long journey. Barry Goldstein, project manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called that image "spectacular." The orbiter will act as a middleman communicator between the Phoenix and NASA.

At some point over the next few days, the lander's 7.7-foot robotic arm is scheduled to begin functioning. The robotic arm is set to collect the first soil samples in about a week.

The lander is expected to function for about 90 days with energy generated by the solar panels.

"Seven minutes of terror will be followed by three months of joy," a jovial Goldstein said during Monday's press conference, referring to the seven minutes of the final stage of landing.

But it is possible that the lander will function longer.

"We are going to operate till Mars freezes over," Goldstein joked.

Here is one of the octagonal solar panels, which open like handheld, collapsible fans on either side of the spacecraft. Beyond this view is a small slice of the north polar terrain of Mars. The image has been geometrically corrected, according to NASA.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona))

Artist's montage shows NASA's Phoenix spacecraft en route to and landing on Mars. For a gallery of images of the lander, click on the picture.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Updated 6:31 PM PDT with initial information from the arrival of Phoenix on Mars and then again at 7:20 PM PDT with one of the first images from the lander. That follows an earlier update to reflect the Phoenix lander's acceleration as it approached Mars and to clarify its speed and course in traveling through space.

NASA said Sunday evening that radio signals have been received from the Phoenix spacecraft on the surface of Mars.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is the latest embodiment of humankind's quest to learn whether life might once have been sustainable on the Red Planet and to prepare for eventual human exploration there.

But before it can dig into the surface, Phoenix first had to traverse the Martian atmosphere. Those seven minutes of descent, the very last leg of the months-long journey, are what could have been the killer: the lander, its developers say, faced "seven minutes of terror" before touching down. Of 11 total previous attempts by several nations to put a spacecraft on Mars, according to NASA, only five had been successful.

In entering the thin Martian atmosphere and heading to the surface, Phoenix faced these tribulations: "aeroshell braking" via friction with the atmosphere that would heat it to thousands of degrees, a parachute opening that would give the lander a hard jerk to slow it further, and pulsing retrorockets tasked with making a soft touchdown.

Because it takes 15 minutes for signals to travel between Mars and Earth, Phoenix was designed to land autonomously. The confirming signal came shortly before 5:00 p.m. PDT Sunday.

"We've passed the hardest part and we're breathing again, but we still need to see that Phoenix has opened its solar arrays and begun generating power," Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement Sunday. Batteries are providing power at the moment.

How's the weather on Mars? In the days just before Phoenix's arrival, a dust cloud passed over the landing area but Sunday's descent was expected to take place in clear Martian skies.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/MSSS )

NASA said that it expects to learn the status of the solar arrays later Sunday night, along with information on whether the stereo camera and weather station have been moved into their deployed positions, as Phoenix relays signals via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. The first attempt to use the 7.7-foot robotic arm will come in a couple of days.

In the final day or two before landing, all was well.

"The spacecraft is in good health," Brent Shockley, Phoenix configuration and information management engineer at NASA, wrote in the Phoenix Mars Lander blog on Saturday. On Sunday, NASA reported that it had decided not to make any final adjustment to the spacecraft's trajectory.

In its approach to Mars, the vehicle had been traveling at an incredibly high rate of speed--though exactly how fast depends on the point of reference. Shockley wrote Friday: "Phoenix is currently traveling 75,400 miles per hour with respect to Earth. With respect to the sun, however, Phoenix is traveling 44,300 miles per hour. With respect to Mars, Phoenix is traveling a modest 6,090 miles per hour."

At midday Sunday, NASA said things were accelerating: "The spacecraft's speed relative to Mars increased from 6,300 miles per hour at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time to 8,500 mph at 12:30 p.m., headed for a speed higher than 12,000 mph before reaching the top of the Martian atmosphere."

Shockley joked in his blog about the spacecraft's energy efficiency. "At a time when gas prices are soaring," he wrote, "Phoenix is getting good fuel economy at about 2 million miles per gallon."

The lander is now about 170 million miles from Earth--after having traveled 422 million miles through space after liftoff from Earth in August.

This screen grab from NASA TV is a raw, or unprocessed, image taken Sunday by the Phoenix lander on Mars.

(Credit: NASA)

Using its robotic arm, Phoenix will dig into the surface to bring up both soil and ice. In its platform structure, the lander will then analyze those samples to help scientist on Earth create models of Mars' historic climate and to predict future atmospheric conditions.

Water on Mars exists only in solid and gaseous form, though previous missions to and around the planet have suggested that it once flowed in liquid form--as recently, NASA says, as about 100,000 years ago.

Scientists are also hoping that Phoenix can help determine "habitability" properties of the soil such as pH and saltiness.

The Stereo Surface Imager atop the lander, meanwhile, will produce panoramic images of the surface with a resolution of 1,024 x 1,024 pixels.

Even with a successful landing and initial operation, the Phoenix machinery isn't likely to have more than a short-term mission. Besides simply operating in the extreme cold of the Martian arctic and facing a potential onslaught of dust storms, it is not expected to get back into operation after the Martian winter when its solar panels will be rendered ineffective by complete darkness.

That said, no one expected the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity to last more than a few months, and they ended up sending back data for a number of years.

It used to be that only a select few scientists could train to become an astronaut, and then even fewer were chosen to venture into space. But now, with the declining influence of NASA and the rise of the commercial space industry, seemingly every private citizen and their mother wants to go into space one day.

Life on Mars, so far visited only by robotic rovers, would be no day at the beach.

(Credit: NASA/JPL)

For two students at MIT, that day is already here--in Utah. Engineering graduate students Zahra Khan and Phillip Cunio--both from MIT's department of Aeronautics and Astronautics--have set up a site in the Utah desert near Hanksville that simulates conditions on Mars. They've been living in a footlocker-sized container, wearing spacesuits, recycling their own water and eating freeze-dried food since Feb. 17.

Everything is outfitted with radio-frequency ID tags, so that their system can alert them if supplies run low or are misplaced. The two have even sent e-mail, but there's a lag of 20 minutes before it reaches the recipient. That's the time it takes for radio waves to travel to and from the Red Planet.

The goal of the project, which will last two weeks, is to develop a "smart" carrier for use in fieldwork research in remote expeditions, including planetary exploration.

"The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is an analog simulation facility. This means it's in a place that's a lot like Mars and so we pretend we're actually on Mars in order to practice living and working there," according to Cunio, who's keeping a blog on the project.

Yet it's not quite like Mars. His partner Khan aborted the mission halfway through to fly to Amsterdam for a job interview with the European Space Agency.

Find reports on the mission via the MDRS Webcam and on Cunio's blog.

Little green men? Roswell, N.M.? Nope. This invasion is centered on Cisco Monitoring Analysis and Response System (MARS). Cisco MARS (formerly Protego) is a hybrid event management and network behavior analysis product that monitors network/security devices and network traffic, looking for anomalous activities and ongoing security events.

Cisco is one of dozens of vendors who play in this networking/security management nexus. The competitors are not slouches; the list includes a few recognizable companies such as EMC, IBM and Symantec. Even the "start-ups" in this space are pretty mature. ArcSight, Arbor Networks, Mazu Networks and SourceFire have been around for years, raised tons of dough, and established themselves with enterprise and service provider customers.

This begs the question: Why is Cisco MARS so prevalent? There are three main reasons:

1. Cisco continues to give away the razors to sell the blades. In this case, MARS is a razor, while switches, routers, security devices, IP-telephony or anything else Cisco sales reps have in their product catalogs are the blades. The strategy is simple. Get MARS out in as many accounts as you can. It's hard to buy a competing widget when Cisco will give you one for free.

2. Security remains a networking domain. Say what you will about recent security imperatives around encryption, data leakage protection or identity management, most security folks come from a networking background. In spite of IBM's data center presence, Microsoft's desktop dominance and Juniper's routing excellence, no one can shmooze the enterprise networking crowd like Cisco.

3. Cisco's phat sales and marketing resources give it an unfair advantage. OK, IBM and EMC are strong here too, but Cisco has done a great job of using its account relationships, field-level expertise and marketing communications skills to get its product in the door. In a confusing market space like security management, Cisco has the right people, money and message.

Many competitors dismiss Cisco saying that MARS is an inferior product. Hmm, sounds a lot like what Digital Research said about DR-DOS when Microsoft won the IBM PC business. I can't recall the last time I even thought about Digital Research, can you?

Right now, security management is extremely hot, so everyone is winning their share of business, but all the vendors in this space say that they see Cisco MARS everywhere. As things get a bit tighter, this may put Cisco in the security management catbird's seat.

Insomniacs may have reason to hope. Hope, that is, beyond prescription drugs that have recently been known to turn some users into sleepwalking wrecks.

Scientists have discovered that light therapy might help people whose insomnia is caused by an internal body clock that is longer or shorter than normal, according to an article from Reuters. Researchers from Harvard found that light therapy can help astronauts having a hard time adjusting to life on Mars, where days last nearly 25 hours.

According to the research, which was commissioned by NASA, two 45-minute exposures to bright light in the evening could help people whose sleep rhythm is out of balance.