The landing thrusters aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander apparently did their job and them some. First, they successfully fired and gently deposited the multimillion dollar probe on the surface of the Red Planet. And then, by doing just that, they blew away three to six inches of Martian soil to reveal the shiny, slick face of what could be a large ice patch. Brendan Fraser's frozen caveman body was noticeably absent from this block of ice, but NASA scientists were elated anyway. The discovery reaffirms that the landing was indeed a bull's eye, akin to the Opportunity rover "hole in one" crater touchdown more than four years ago.
"It's the consensus of all of us that we have found ice," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, which is leading the Phoenix project with help from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "It's shiny and smooth - it's absolutely astounding!" he said. Exclamation points aside, Smith did concede, as scientists are wont to do, that the gleaming slab could be "something else," but the leading interpretation is that future tests will confirm it is ice.
Joe Keenan wrote: The "we might have a short circuit when we run the next test" line seems like a attempt to immunize the test from failure. If it is ice, they'll rightly crow, if it's not ice they have a pre-established thread to immunize the failure.
Is anyone other than me put off by the shameless PR campaign coming out from NASA? Pictures from a Mars rover (you have them here on this sight) showed the white stuff under the soil, they knew it was there before they dug, then they then act surprised and squeal like a bunch of adolescent girls at a Bay City Rollers concert when they see more white stuff. W need some staid Germans to start running the place again.
ElecGeekMom wrote:Here's a dumb question: Is it possible that water vapor could have been part of the exhaust that was present as the probe touched down?
ElecGeekMom wrote:Here's a dumb question: Is it possible that water vapor could have been part of the exhaust that was present as the probe touched down?
Ben D wrote:It is difficult to understand why anyone would doubt that there is water on mars,...it seems water is ubiquitous,...comets, planets, moons, etc..
How many of you would have considered that there would be water in Mercury's atmosphere?
MESSENGER Scientists 'Astonished' to Find Water in Mercury's Thin Atmosphere
moses wrote:Would you care to explain this again ? Is it water sublimating or CO2 ?
The black area seems to have warmed wrt the white area, as one would
expect, and turned somewhat liquid. But I don't understand exactly what
you are saying.
Mo
I think it's sublimating CO2 ice leaving that pattern as it sublimates and 'retreats'. I don't think the pattern is the result of anything liquid 'running down the slope of a hill'. Better?
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