Ice Found on Mars by Phoenix
“We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for Phoenix. “The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.”
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After only five days and 20 hours on Mars, NASA’s Phoenix Lander has found what “looks like” ice beneath its surface. Friday’s images from the Phoenix’s Robotic Arm Camera are showing patches of smooth and level surfaces beneath its busters, suggesting there is an ice table under the thin layer of loose soil. With soil blown away when the spacecraft landed on Mars, the possible ice patch could very well be shiny hard rock. More data needs to be taken along with color information from the robotic arm. If ice is the find, the hard surface with become much brighter mainly because “atmospheric water vapor” will collect as new frost appears on the ice, according to Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louise, MO, co-investigator of the Phoenix’s robotic arm.
A short circuit was found when testing was done by a Phoenix instrument, the TEGA, that “bakes and sniffs” samples in order to identify ingredients. New commands were developed for diagnostic steps to become developed, and will be sent to the Phoenix in the next day or so. The circuit that shorted was found when tests recording electrical behavior that was consistent with an intermittent short circuit in the spectrometer portion.
“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 temperature has been pretty nice and sunny at the Phoenix landing site, but there is increasing dust developing in the Martian atmosphere. Temperatures are at -22 degrees F. at the sun’s high, with a -112 degrees F. as its low. The mission is safe to proceed, meeting plenty of criteria to evaluate and use 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.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
