Did the Phoenix Lander Discover Ice or Salt on Mars?
Scientists are trying to determine whether the Phoenix lander has found ice or salt on Mars.
It’s been three weeks since Phoenix touched ground on Mars’ north pole region with the mission of finding more clues as to whether or not the planet could be habitable.
Equipped with a backhoe-like robotic arm, Phoenix has turned up specks of what appears to be white material amongst the red dirt. Photos show that the white matter is only present in the top part of the trench.
Over the weekend, Phoenix merged two trenches into a single pit measuring over a foot and 3 inches deep near a polygon-shaped pattern in the ground that some scientists believe may have formed by the seasonal melting of underground ice.
Phoenix will take images of the trench dubbed "Dodo-Goldilocks" over the next few days to record any changes. If it’s ice, scientists expect it to sublimate when exposed to the sun because of the planet’s frigid temperatures and low atmospheric pressure.
"We think it’s ice. But again, until we can see it disappear … we’re not guaranteed yet," mission scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis said Monday.
One of the ovens on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander continued baking its first sample of Martian soil over the weekend, while the Robotic Arm dug deeper into the soil to learn more about white material first revealed on June 3.
“The oven is working very well and living up to our expectations," said Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), or oven instrument, for Phoenix.
Phoenix is equipped with eight separate tiny ovens to bake the soil at three different temperature ranges in order to find volatile ingredients, such as water.
But scientists say that even if the mysterious white material isn’t ice, the discovery of salt would also be significant because it’s normally formed when water evaporates in the soil.
Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains on May 25 on a three-month, $420 million mission to study whether the polar environment could be favorable for primitive life to emerge.
The project is led by the University of Arizona and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The lander was built by Lockheed Martin Corp.
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