Weather information on your Windows Vista SP1 desktop can now be an interplanetary experience with the help of the Windows Sidebar. While there are a luxuriant variety of weather gadgets for the Windows Sidebar in Vista, there is one that's out of this world, literally. The Phoenix Mars Weather Gadget will bring Vista users weather information from Mars. The gadget is an item of novelty rather than anything else, and certainly delivers little practical data that users will be able to take advantage of. However, the Vista utility represents, in fact, a small connection between individual desktops and a piece of equipment which is currently exploring Mars.

"You can get the latest weather (Maximum and Minimum temperatures per Sol or Martian Solar Day) on Mars from the Phoenix Mars Lander delivered to your desktop from the Phoenix lander currently on Mars. The Phoenix Mars Lander is a Martian lander (not a rover like Mars Pathfinder) designed to look for evidence of water or ice under the surface of Mars. Instead of roaming around the surface of Mars looking for water evidence - the Phoenix lander will dig below the surface to look for water or ice," revealed Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is the first example of NASA's Mars Scout class. The lander was launched in August 2007 and landed on Mars in May 2008, taking on the mission of exploring Earth's neighbor for traces of ice. On June 19, Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith (University of Arizona, Tucson) indicated that the lander did manage to come across ice on Mars after what he referred to as "dice-size crumbs of bright material" seem to have disappeared from a trench dug at the start of this week.

"It must be ice," Smith said. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

The March weather update is available through the Phoenix Gadget which can be downloaded from here.