(No entry yesterday because we were on the road, driving home from a Thanksgiving visit to my family. Seventeen and a half hours, to travel less than 800 miles by highway… now I remember why we usually travel on the Saturday or Monday after Thanksgiving, instead of the Sunday. The traffic was horrid.)

It seems that the Mars rover Spirit, which is stuck in what increasingly looks like its grave, is still turning up surprises:

Space boffins analysing pics from the mired Mars-prowler say that the ground its wheels have churned in a futile effort to escape “holds evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis”.

If both Mars and our moon have water, space travel and colonies on planets other than Earth both become a lot more feasible. Now if someone would just invent the Lyle drive…