Paper Monitor
10:59 UK time, Tuesday, 27 May 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It's a God-awful small affair... compared with soaring food and fuel prices, natural disasters, and Gordon Brown's poll ratings, that is. But the first crop of pictures to be beamed back to Earth by Nasa's unmanned Phoenix spacecraft provides some welcome relief from these more earthly concerns.
"Life on Mars? Pages 6-7" asks the Daily Mail on its front page, suggesting it might know something the rest of us don't. It doesn't, which is no small mercy - imagine telling your grandchildren you first heard news of extraterrestrial life from a teaser on the front page of a paper.
The accompanying picture of the Arizona desert the Red Planet perhaps portends more than it visually delivers, hence the space it's granted on the pages of the Mail and the Guardian.
The Mirror decides to add some drama to the occasion by fuzzifying its "Live from Mars" headline to look as if it too has been beamed back 423 million miles. And the Sun... well, it's just happy to call a spade a spade. "Went to Mars... all we got was this lousy photo" runs the headline, over a picture of a sweet wrapper (no prizes for guessing the brand) Photoshopped (registered trademark Adobe) on to the Phoenix snapshot, and alongside a story by "Sun Spaceman" Paul Sutherland.
There's even a guide on how to recreate your own Mars-scape, with a bag of B&Q ballast, sand and cement. Such wilful frivolity in the face of dogged scientific endeavour - next they'll be telling us it ain't the place to raise a kid, in fact it's cold as hell. Or will that be ?
The 
