Life in Newburgh on Ythan

By Talpa

The MASA mission to the third planet

It is now almost a year since Mission Control at MASA (Mars Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced that they had successfully landed the first of two unmanned probes in the northern hemisphere of the third planet from the sun. The mission is designed to look for evidence that life once existed on this, now barren, planet.
Since that historic day the two probes have beamed back several google-bytes of data providing evidence that the planet did indeed once support life, possibly intelligent life.
It is now many days since one of the probes last made contact with mission control and MASA scientists had become increasingly worried that the probes had failed. Then, early this morning, probe 2 came back on line and transmitted a series of exciting images, of which this is the most intriguing. It shows a very large wheeled structure lying half buried in a sand dune. MASA archaeologists are pretty sure that it is some form of war chariot that has been used for the burial of a high ranking individual, possibly a King. Our linguistic specialists are trying to decipher the strange markings on the chariot in the hope that they might reveal the name of the dead King. X-ray scatter tomography of the large, rear part of the burial structure suggest that it is packed with tonnes of organic material, possibly food to sustain the dead on his voyage to the afterlife.
The probe's ground penetrating radar suggests that there are many similar structures in the surrounding area, raising hopes that we have happened upon a Royal Necropolis!

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