Palscience

Yesterday, Nasa officials announced that they are seeing either Ice mixed with soil or rocks under Phoenix lander. You could take a look at the images I posted and see whats beneath the lander. My first guess when I saw the image was rocks not Ice, but since Mars has a very low temprature (minus 30 degrees Celsius, minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) ), it might be Ice.

Nasa official said “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.

They have also said “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.