After a flight of 10 months and 422 million miles, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander last May executed a flawless seven-minute descent through the Red Planet's thin atmosphere to touch down north of its arctic circle. It was only the sixth success among 12 Martian landing attempts. Within two hours Phoe- nix had transmitted the first surface images of the planet's polar terrain: a level plain marked with regular octagonal mounds and furrows, evidence of freeze-thaw cycles in a substance that Phoenix's instruments would prove to be frozen water. "Those octagons just were beautiful," says principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona.
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机译：经过10个月，4.22亿英里的飞行之后，美国国家航空航天局（NASA）的凤凰号火星着陆器（Phoenix Mars Lander）去年5月在红色星球稀薄的大气层中进行了无瑕的7分钟下降，降落到北极圈以北。这只是12次火星登陆尝试中的第六次成功。在两个小时内，菲尼克斯传送了行星极地地形的第一张表面图像：一个标有规则八角形丘陵和犁沟的平地，证明了菲尼克斯仪器将被证明是冷冻水的冻融循环证据。亚利桑那大学的首席研究员彼得·史密斯说：“那些八边形很漂亮。”
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