Safely into harbour

摘要

Odysseus took ten years to get home after the Trojan war. The American space probe named in his honour, which went into orbit around its destination during the early hours of Wednesday morning (London time), travelled rather faster: Mars Odyssey was launched only in April.rnIts successful arrival is particularly welcome, because two previous missions to Mars by NASA, America's space agency, in 1999, ended in failure. Mars Polar Lander did touch down, but refused to report back to its' controllers. Mars Climate Orbiter went sailing merrily past the planet owing to the slight problem that one group of its engineers was working in metric units, and another was using imperial ones.