Phoenix is scheduled to land on Mars at about 4.30 am, IST, tomorrow (26 May 2008) according to Badri Baba, who got this information from a Countdown timer at the NASA site when he was doing various other "looking for"s.

I remember, some thirty years ago,when I was Badri Baba's age, Viking was scheduled to land on Mars and I kept track through daily and sometimes twice-daily "handouts" which my father would bring home from the USIS.

Today, verily , the mountain has come to Mohammad.

The boys have been "into" the Solar System, the Universe, Space probes, and suchlike for a few months now. There are boulders on the "Nesting Grounds" which serve as Spaceships every evening, till it is too dark to be outside. They have been landing on Mars and the "twilight zone" of Mercury. So they were thrilled to bits a couple of days ago when they found that there was to be an actual landing.

Varun Baba, on hearing about Laika, Belka and Strelka being sent into space, created a world where dogs send men into space "to see if it is OK" before themselves venturing out.

Badri Baba has some stuff on the Scratch site which you can take a look at.

The house is full of paper models (truncated icosahedrons I am told) of the planets. This started off with paper models of the earth. Prior to that there were maps of various places, this possibly being sparked off by our trip to Assam, where they were tracking our train journey, in real time, on an atlas.

They have also made a map of the U.K. on which are marked Carlisle, Dumfries and Gallowgate.I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out the connection.