It’s a Question Somebody’s Bound to Ask

They’ve found frozen water on Mars. This is a BIG deal, even though people have known for years that Mars has water locked away in permafrost and as a huge component of one of the polar caps. So, why is the Phoenix Lander’s confirmation of water ice such big news? Because we can reach that ice and study it. As Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the mission told the press a couple of days ago, “The truth we’re looking for is is not just looking at ice. It’s in finding out the mineral, chemicals, and hopefully the organic materials associated with these discoveries.”

Finding out what’s dissolved in the water that made the ice Phoenix is studying will tell Smith and his gang of scientists a great deal about whether Mars has (or ever did have) conditions where life might thrive. You could do the same thing with frozen water here on Earth, and figure out from various dissolved minerals and their abundances (how much of them is in the water) a lot about the life that exists here on our planet and its effect on the environment. Every living thing changes its environment a little (or sometimes a lot), and those changes show up as chemical abundance shifts and (in the case of fossils) in geologic layers, or as organic compounds mixed with soil and rock. Water is part of the equation of life, so confirming its existence with a lander that has an onboard chemical analysis lab is a great leap forward. Now we can melt that ice and study it. I can’t wait to find out what it’s telling us!

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.