Posted on 05/31/2008 12:00:48 PM PDT by Dawnsblood
Scientists have discovered what may be ice that was exposed when soil was blown away as NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars last Sunday, May 25. The possible ice appears in an image the robotic arm camera took underneath the lander, near a footpad.
"We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be seeing exposed ice in the retrorocket blast zone," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., co-investigator for the robotic arm. "We'll test the two ideas by getting more data, including color data, from the robotic arm camera. We think that if the hard features are ice, they will become brighter because atmospheric water vapor will collect as new frost on the ice.
"Full confirmation of what we're seeing will come when we excavate and analyze layers in the nearby workspace," Arvidson said.
Testing last night of a Phoenix instrument that bakes and sniffs samples to identify ingredients identified a possible short circuit. This prompted commands for diagnostic steps to be developed and sent to the lander in the next few days. The instrument is the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer. It includes a calorimeter that tracks how much heat is needed to melt or vaporize substances in a sample, plus a mass spectrometer to examine vapors driven off by the heat. The Thursday, May 29, tests recorded electrical behavior consistent with an intermittent short circuit in the spectrometer portion.
"We have developed a strategy to gain a better understanding of this behavior, and we have identified workarounds for some of the possibilities," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead scientist for the instrument.
The latest data from the Canadian Space Agency's weather station shows another sunny day at the Phoenix landing site with temperatures holding at minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) as the sol's high, and a low of minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit). The lidar instrument was activated for a 15-minute period just before noon local Mars time, and showed increasing dust in the atmosphere.
"This is the first time lidar technology has been used on the surface of another planet," said the meteorological station's chief engineer, Mike Daly, from MDA in Brampton, Canada. "The team is elated that we are getting such interesting data about the dust dynamics in the atmosphere."
The mission passed a "safe to proceed" review on Thursday evening, meeting criteria to proceed with evaluating and using the science instruments.
"We have evaluated the performance of the spacecraft on the surface and found we're ready to move forward. While we are still investigating instrument performance such as the anomaly on TEGA [Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer], the spacecraft's infrastructure has passed its tests and gets a clean bill of health," said David Spencer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., deputy project manager for Phoenix.
"We're still in the process of checking out our instruments," Phoenix project scientist Leslie Tamppari of JPL said. "The process is designed to be very flexible, to respond to discoveries and issues that come up every day. We're in the process of taking images and getting color information that will help us understand soil properties. This will help us understand where best to first touch the soil and then where and how best to dig."
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. For more about Phoenix, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.
They don’t have Happy Ice up there? Explains a lot.
I suppose it could be, but 1) it is the official Jet Propulsion Lab website and 2) they just announced the same on Fox (though I will admit that since I am only listening, I did not see a picture there). Still these are Gov computers and hackers do love to target them so it is well within the realm of possiblity.
Well tell them to get busy protecting our borders.
By golly you’re right! If we see one with LOL we’ll know for sure somethings up ;o)
I suppose now the NHL will want a franchise for a hockey team, eh?
2 hours ago
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — A spokeswoman for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission says a hacker took over the mission's public Web site during the night and changed its lead news story.
Spokeswoman Sara Hammond says a mission update posted Friday was replaced with a hacker's signature and a link redirecting visitors to an overseas Web site.
Hammond says the site hosted by the University of Arizona has been taken off line while computer experts work to correct the problem.
The Mars Lander vehicle touched down on the Red Planet last Sunday to search for traces of organic compounds that are the basic building blocks of life.
“My heart be still!!!”
NOT!!!
Whoopty freakin doo. They’ve only been telling us there’s water on Mars for like what - like the last ten years or so?
I really don’t care if they find ice.
Wake me up if they find a Slurpee!
the noive of some folks..
Press Release
Hard Substrate, Possibly Ice, Uncovered Under the Mars Lander05.31.08
The Robotic Arm Camera on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander captured this image underneath the lander on the fifth Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Descent thrusters on the bottom of the lander are visible at the top of the image.
This view from the north side of the lander toward the southern leg shows smooth surfaces cleared from overlying soil by the rocket exhaust during landing. One exposed edge of the underlying material was seen in Sol 4 images, but the newer image reveals a greater extent of it. The abundance of excavated smooth and level surfaces adds evidence to a hypothesis that the underlying material is an ice table covered by a thin blanket of soil.
The bright-looking surface material in the center, where the image is partly overexposed may not be inherently brighter than the foreground material in shadow.
The Phoenix Mission is led by the University of Arizona, Tucson, on behalf of NASA. Project management of the mission is by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Spacecraft development is by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech//University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute
It’s one thing to know there is water ice there.
It is another thing entirely to be able to examine it and understand it’s nature. Can martian life exist there today just under the surface? And for us, how can we exploit it when we one day live there?
Understanding the details is how science works.
It IS exciting. To think that humans did not even know how to fly just over 100 years ago. To today, examining an alien worlds surface! The amount of science learned in a single human lifespan is staggering.
I would recalibrate my sense of wonder if I were you.
Don’t worry about my sense of wonder.
I participate in almost all these threads. I remember my dad reading the newspaper in bed one morning with “GLENN DOES THREE ORBITS” splashed on the cover.
I remember me and my mom and probably a billion other people watching a fuzzy picture of a very bundled up guy sorta bouncing down and the audio you could barely make out “That’s one small step...”
BUT!!!!
I am already quite firmly convinced there is AT LEAST simple lifeforms on Mars. (Bacteria, lichens, molds and spores, etc) and possibly more complex forms.
I am also pretty close to convinced that they (the mysterious, unknown “they” that show up on all the conspiracy threads) ALREADY KNOW AND ARE ENGINEERING A WAY TO GENTLY TELL US.
So my sense of wonder is fine.
Wake me up when they find that Slurpee!
And humanity continues to have visions..
“Wake me up when they find that Slurpee!”
Better yet, let’s learn to make them there ourselves out of some of that ice.
While I’m in rant mode, might as well take advantage of it.
Can somebody please send NASA one of their old, used Kodachromes?
Talk about quantum leaps!
So far, the best stuff I’ve seen is the stuff coming from MRO!
Like a human being, Phoenix’s stereo camera has a right and left eye for seeing things in three dimensions. Using images from the two points of view, graphic artist Patrick Vantuyne of Belgium has created some superb anaglyphs of the lander’s surroundings. Put on your 3D glasses and behold: Mars Yeti http://spaceweather.com/swpod2008/02jun08/vantuyne4.jpg (Phoenix’s arm makes a first impression on the Red Planet); One small step... (one of the lander’s three feet); Vines (the camera’s mast casts a criss-crossed shadow on the ground).
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