Use of English PRO

For me, the (0) HIGHLIGHT of this past week's science news was the images (1) ............ back from the Curiosity rover, providing (2) ............ geologic evidence that water flowed on Mars. Of course, this wasn't exactly a surprise; for decades, planetary scientists have suggested the channel networks visible in spacecraft imagery couldn't have been made by anything else. The evidence has been (3) ............ as well, as various clay minerals and iron oxides have been identified through hyperspectral imagery. Nonetheless, I suspect that the image of definitely water-lain (4) ............ made the heart of more than one geologist (5) ............ a beat. Ground truth. You could argue that the scientific exploration of the extra-terrestrial is, at least (6) ............ part, a search for meaning: to position us within a larger cosmology. But our fascination with, and connection to, what we see in the night sky comes not just through science, but also through art. So it should come as no surprise that scientific images of planetary surfaces have (7) ............ inspiration to a range of artists from Galileo - whose first sketches of the moon through a telescope are (8) ............ beautiful - to Barbara Hepworth - whose interpretations of the lunar surface are far less literal.