Earlier this week NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander captured a sequence of images showing clouds drifting across the morning Martian sky. NASA composited the images into a single animation that gives you a feel for the view, which I find fascinating. Not hard to imagine this being the view out the window of your Martian homestead...

Most of the year there are only thin, high clouds of frozen carbon dioxide, but as winter approaches the atmosphere gets cold enough for water to condense and form clouds, haze, and even fog at lower levels.

Phoenix has also detected thin wisps of snow falling from some of these winter clouds, though the instrument involved was a LIDAR system that produces graphical scans of the Martian atmosphere rather than photographic images.

Last week I had an extraordinary opportunity to be part of Spaceward Bound, an educational program developed and funded by NASA in which teachers and students participate in scientific research in remote and extreme environments on Earth as analogs for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

The concept is wonderful. K-12 teachers and undergraduate science majors interested in teaching come together with planetary scientists specializing in the search for life in extreme environments. This isn't just a classroom exercise, though. Spaceward Bound takes place in the field, and this past week was at the California State University Desert Studies Center in Zzyzx, California, in the heart of the Mojave Desert.

I wasn't there as either a scientist or a teacher but as a volunteer assistant for my wife Elaine, an instructor in microbiology at San Jose State University and graduate student doing NASA-funded research on bacteria that might survive on Mars. I'd happily signed up for a week of doing whatever she needed me to do -- haul gear, take pictures of field activities, help in the lab, record data, or anything else.

It was an amazing learning experience for me and I had a fabulous time. Days were full to overflowing with trips into the desert for experiments or sampling, long hours in the lab to culture samples or extract DNA, and working sessions to help the teachers brainstorm ways they could bring what they were learning to their students. The Desert Studies Center was interesting in its own right having been built in the 1940s as a spa and health resort to take advantage of a large mineral spring at the edge of Soda Dry Lake. There were more than a few surprises, several of which helped reinforce how inhospitable and sometimes dangerous the desert can be.

So, I'll sort out my notes from the days there and use them to create a few entries here. In the meantime I've posted a few photos from the trip, which you can see via the flickr badge over there on the right side of this page.