Mars lander discovers ice!

[n2doc]

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Saturday, May 31, 2008



(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.

more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/31/BAUR1117NC.DTL&tsp=1

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Ooohh, bright, shiny object to look at!

Seriously, this is very interesting news.

[Botany]

2. Thank God now the astronauts can have their magaritas frozen

when the get to mars.

Adonde esta la fiesta?
La fiesta es encendido estropea

[seriousstan]

3. Here's a pic. It was just inches under the soil and the lander's retros blew the soil off.

Too cool!

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

4. I'm there!

Now when we fight on Mars, hockey games can break out!

[cloudbase]

32. Hell,

there's probably some Dutch guy speed skating on it now.

[notadmblnd]

5. it doesn't look wet

wouldn't some of it have been melted by the heat from the rockets? Maybe it didn't take the picture till it cooled down and refrozen. I guess if the want to make sure, they should test fire the rockets?

[Warpy]

6. Whatever it is would have refrozen

a few nanoseconds after the engines shut off.

The Martian poles are COLD, colder than anything here on Earth.

Shoot, I remember 22 below in Indiana. I discovered if I spit, it would freeze on the way down and BOUNCE.

[Sequoia]

16. Neat.

This book I read, "Koko", talked about it being so cold in Wisconson that rainbows could freeze. I wondered if was true or just fiction. At any rate, it was a very good scary book.

[moggie]

21. Of course rainbows can't freeze!

A rainbow is just light refracted by water droplets. The droplets can freeze (and I think a kind of rainbow can be caused by refraction through airborne ice crystals), but the rainbow itself is light. What's the freezing point of photons? :-)

[pokerfan]

22. And more specifically

a rainbow is purely subjective. You are seeing photons reflected/refracted from the sun back to your eyes at a very specific angle:



A secondary (double) rainbow has an extra internal reflection:



I last saw a complete double rainbow in Canada about six years ago. It was spectacular and it looked a lot like this:



But my point is that their is no one objective "arch" of droplets that cause the rainbow. It's just the self-selected arch or droplets at that particular angle with respect to you.

[krispos42]

29. Oh goodie, a chance to post this pic...

[14thColony]

26. ...

[eppur_se_muova]

7. It would have sublimed or refrozen.

The atmosphere there is extremely thin -- ~0.006-0.007 Earth atmospheres. And it's COLD -- cold enough for CO2 to freeze out at times.

Water cannot exist as a liquid under those conditions -- only as solid or gas.

[Orsino]

9. Correct. We expect exposed water ice to sublimate under Martian polar conditions. n/t

[struggle4progress]

13. But then it is perhaps surprising that such a thin detritus cover has prevented sublimation

Of course, if most of the cover is very fine dust, the mean free molecular path will be very small and the rate of sublimation correspondingly reduced, but the stuff has had plenty of time

[Ian David]

20. Can they briefly fire the engines just a little bit to see if it melts? n/t

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Wouldn't it be embarassing if it turned out to be ordinary diamond?

Wouldn't even pay for the trip home.

(And besides, ice has been known for centuries.:evilgrin:)

[bluesmail]

10. I am cautiously pessimistic at the authenticity of the pictures.

Also, what a supreme waste of money. Corporations get to have all the fun.

[Indenturedebtor]

17. Why corporations? And why a waste of money?

This program proved the landing method that we are most likely to use for future manned missions. And finding ice is also important. If for no other reason at least now we know where we can find water ice in the future - so that if we need to use it to make rocket fuel or to drink we know where to go.

And of course that's without even using a lot of the other technologies on board!

If we don't get off this rock we're screwed. And in the effort we'll come up with all sorts of great things like Tang, and Velcro :P

[Johonny]

28. what you don't think sending people to Mars

has any value at all? The future of space exploration is so obvious yet so many people don't seem to get it. To quote Robert Park "John Glenn became the first person to orbit Earth... Later that same year Mariner 2 flew by the cloud-shrouded planet Venus... Few people seemed aware of the significance of what was happening:it was our robots, not our astronauts that were exploring the solar system." People still don't get it.

[Book Lover]

30. I'm going to baldly copy and paste

something I posted at another board last night:

The Phoenix program (both landers) cost US taxpayers about $820 million dollars http://tinyurl.com/5ejk6c

The San Francisco 2007-2008 budget, by comparison, totals $6.1 billion http://tinyurl.com/64qhpu page 23. As a for instance, SF allocated $1,315,426,461 for community health services in this budget (pp 64-65), approx. $495,000,000 more than what NASA, a federally funded agency, spent on this mission.

Going to Mars is a fucking bargain.

[Sancho]

11. Dilithium crystals!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium_(Star_Trek)

Dilithium typically occurs as an extremely hard crystalline mineral, which occurs naturally on some planets. When placed in a high frequency electromagnetic field, magnetic eddies are induced in its structure which keep charged particles away from the crystal lattice. This prevents it from reacting with antimatter when so energized, because the antimatter atoms never actually touch it. Therefore, it is used to contain and regulate the annihilation reaction of matter and antimatter in a starship's warp core, which otherwise would explode from the uncontrolled annihilation reaction. Though low-quality artificial crystals can be grown or replicated, they are limited in the power of the reaction they can regulate without fragmenting, and are therefore largely unsuitable for warp drive applications. Due to the need for natural dilithium crystals for interstellar travel, deposits of this material are a highly contested resource, and as such, dilithium crystals have led to more interstellar conflict than all other reasons combined.

Dilithium's chemical symbol is Dt, its atomic weight is 87 and it is a member of the hypersonic series of elements, according to a periodic table graphic seen in episodes of The Next Generation<1> and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.<2> The dilithium crystal structure is 2(5)6 dilithium 2(:)l diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide, according to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.

[Tesha]

23. Perhaps we can send Bush and Cheney to the mines then?

Maybe they'll run into John McCain's next wife?

[HughMoran]

12. kewl

I hope it checks out - very interesting!

[FatDave]

14. I thought we confirmed ice on the Martian poles long ago with good old-fashioned telescopes.

Not that this isn't cool, but I'm a lot more interested in what they find (or don't find) in that ice.

(Edit: Why do my apostrophes always become semicolons?)

[DramaOnHwy61]

15. Not that this isn't cool,

maybe they'll find like, cool water?

[itsrobert]

31. I'm thinking there should be water

far below the mars surface where the heat of the Mars core can warm it up a bit. But I'm not a science major.

[Random_Australian]

27. Naw, the ice seen by telescopes was solid CO2. n/t

[phantom power]

18. Beautiful confirmation of the Gamma Ray Spectrometer predictions!

[Ian David]

19. That could be the aluminum roof of a mobile home. n/t

[Phoonzang]

24. The dirt is in the oven!

[Phoonzang]

25. And....the oven isn't working. Great.

Meh, a person could do more in a week what all these rovers and landers have taken 30 years to do.