Mars lander discovers ice, scientists say

[karyn]

from sf gate

(05-31) 15:26 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Elated scientists probing the arctic surface of Mars with their newly-landed Phoenix spacecraft said Saturday they are convinced they have found a bright and shiny layer of real ice only inches beneath the Martian soil and directly under the body of the lander itself.

"It's the consensus of all of us that we have found ice," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson as he talked to reporters in a conference call only six days after Phoenix landed safely from Earth. "It's shiny and smooth -- it's absolutely astounding!"

But Smith did add a note of scientific caution: "It's not impossible that it's something else," he conceded, "but our leading interpretation is ice. We are looking at an extended table of ice."

And it turns out that Phoenix itself made the epochal discovery, for it was the exhaust from the lander's twelve retrorockets -- firing during the last few seconds of the spacecraft's touchdown last Sunday -that blew a mere three to six inches inches of Martian topsoil away and uncovered the patch of ice near one of the lander's three legs. The camera on the lander's robotic arm snapped images of the flat gleaming slab. Smith added that the newly discovered ice is not the kind of solid carbon dioxide -we call it dry ice -- that covers the Martian polar cap, Smith said

Spacecraft flying in orbit high above the planet carry sensitive radar instruments that can probe as much as a yard or so beneath the Martian surface, and their signals have already indicated a broad layer of what Earth-bound scientists believe is buried ice in the planet's frigid far northern region where Phoenix was sent to explore.

And now, for the first time ever, Phoenix has apparently found it.

So if Smith and his team are right, the find means at the very least that real water - absolutely essential for life as we know it -- could have existed on the red planet when it was warmer millions or billions of years ago, and suggests that Mars may once have had a "habitable" environment.

"Ice is a great preserver," Smith said, "and it's one of the building blocks of life."

But whether this Martian ice has preserved any evidence, or even a suggestion, of ancient life remains the unknown of all unknowns, that Phoenix can't really determine, because its chemistry instruments can only detect organic chemicals and not whether they ever were parts of living organisms.

The scientists on the Phoenix team have given fanciful names to small patches of the surface where they plan to dig into the soil next week. One, for instance, is called Humpty Dumpty, and King of Hearts is another. But this presumed ice patch bears a much more exciting moniker.

Its name is "Holy Cow!" Smith said.

The Phoenix spacecraft's robotic arm holds a bucket designed to scoop soil samples for analysis by the lander's chemistry instruments, and the bucket carries both a camera and a tiny rasp to scrape chips of ice from the exposed material.

Smith said that next week -when the robotic arm starts digging -- some of the ice chips will be melted and combined with small samples of sterile water that Phoenix carried from Earth in order to assess the salinity and chemistry of the new-found Martian ice.

In the journal Science Friday scientists from Harvard and Stony Brook universities reported that Martian rocks analyzed by the Rover Opportunity showed that any water which might have existed on Mars would have been far too salty for any Earth-like organisms to exist there.

But Smith said the sensitive instruments aboard Phoenix will be able to measure even the highest possible levels of salinity in the ice, and he noted that on Earth the saltiest environments -like the Great Salt Lake and other known regions of intense brine - do harbor many species of salt-loving microbes.

The robotic arm's camera is the high-tech tool of Horst Uwe Keller, who is in Tucson from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. The camera, Keller said, can use its light- emitting diodes to illuminate the ice surface for highly accurate full-color stereo images, and Keller said even the first black and white images show that the bright slab beneath the lander is much brighter than any of the surrounding soil.

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com

[OrganizedKhaos]

My husband is SO going to be all geeked out about this when he finds out.

[Mr Karl]

It is interesting how some news reports are contradicting each other...............I kinda like the conspiracy dudes view as to why the pictures are black and white,........because the mars sky is really red, well you get the idea.

[Bikerpunk]

Fuck that shit, wake me when they find oil.

[Rockwulf]

That's pretty exciting. Now all we have to do is set in motion global warming on a slightly faster scale than we did here so we can melt the ice and hang out on "Holy Cow Beach"

[OrganizedKhaos]

Fuck that shit, wake me when they find oil.

BWAHAHAHHAHAH!!!!
You've killed me ...severely!

[evilstonermonkey]

Fuck that shit, wake me when they find oil.

ha, youll be woken by all the shuttle launches as the american space program suddenly kicks up a gear