A material splashed up onto the Phoenix Mars lander.Posted on 03/18/2009 12:35:11 PM PDT by BGHater
Several photographs taken by NASA’s Phoenix Mars spacecraft show what look like water droplets clinging to one of its landing struts.
Some of the scientists working on the mission are asserting that that is exactly what they were. They contend that there are pockets of liquid water just under the Martian surface even though the temperatures in the northern plains never warmed above minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the six months of Phoenix’s operations last year.
The scientists believe that salts may have lowered the freezing temperature of the Martian water droplets to perhaps minus 90 degrees, or more than 120 degrees colder than the usual freezing temperature of 32 degrees for pure water.
Nilton O. Renno, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan who proposed the hypothesis, was careful to say, “This is not a proof.”
But he added: “I think the evidence is overwhelming. It’s not circumstantial evidence.”
Dr. Renno will present his data and arguments this month in a talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, and he is the lead author among 22 authors of a scientific paper submitted to The Journal of Geophysical Research.
Others are completely unconvinced. “There are simpler explanations,” said Michael H. Hecht, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a co-investigator of the Phoenix’s wet chemistry instrument. Dr. Hecht, who described himself as the “designated curmudgeon,” said he believed that the process proposed by Dr. Renno to describe the formation and movement of water droplets was “flat-out wrong for these materials.”
A material splashed up onto the Phoenix Mars lander.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Tis true.
Tars Tarkus told me so.
Yawn. Funding time at NASA again.
Martian Farts (liquid methane)
Water expands when frozen, which is why ice floats. It has to do with the fact that H2O is a stong dipole. Thus, with lower pressure water will freeze at a slightly higher temperature.
The NappyOne
Nope, they like it cause it tastes like chicken.
Some of these scientists are so silly!!
The droplets are from squirt guns the Martians fired at the lander.
Alien drool.
Vinny Gambini: Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than anywhere else on the face of the earth?
Mr. Tipton: I don’t know.
Vinny Gambini: Well, I guess the laws of physics cease to exist on top of your stove. Were these magic grits? Did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?
Those are barnacles. Someone needs to go up there and scrape them off. Gotta repaint now too.
Indeterminable — without a human mission to Mars — therefore goes in the curious, but for now who cares file. :’)
do they appear on the sun facing landing struts? do they evaporate away if the sun hits them?
No life yet at there, still doubt it here.
Obviously calot eggs. Don’t these NASA nerds read the classics??!
Freegards
“Obviously calot eggs. Don’t these NASA nerds read the classics??!”
Sigh! Probably don’t even know what a Barsoomian calot is. Faithful and loyal to a fault, the calots are!
Water brothers......Michael Valentine Smith.
:)
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