Summer Gifts

Those of us in the northern half of planet Earth are celebrating the beginning of summer today. Summer and late spring are planting times, and for millennia, humans have used this time to grow food. I always think of summer as a gift that we all get in return for the winter and its cold, nasty weather (at least, the winters around where I live).

It’s also summer in the Martian northern hemisphere right now. For the folks who are minding the store for the Phoenix Mars mission, their first summer “gift” is finding out that they’ve most likely found the water ice they were looking for on Mars.

This animated image is made from a set of images acquired by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s Surface Stereo Imager on the 21st and 25th days of the mission, or Sols 20 and 24 (June 15 and 18, 2008). They show the sublimation of ice over the course of four days in a trench the scientists have informally named “Dodo-Goldilocks.”

The lumps that are disappearing in the lower left corner are most likely the water ice they were looking for, going away in a process that’s similar to evaporation. In the next few days, the spacecraft will be digging deeper to check out a hard surface the digging arm has found. It’s most likely ice, too.

Photo from NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University.