Ice, Ice, Baby

NASA scientists believe they have proof of water ice on Mars.

Scientists with the Phoenix Mars mission yesterday declared for certain that there is ice on the Red Planet, putting them an essential step closer to answering the question that has driven three decades of Mars exploration and centuries of Earth-bound speculation: Could there have been life there?

Pictures beamed 170 million miles to Earth from the Phoenix lander atop Mars's northern polar plain erased any doubt about the presence of ice, they said.

But the evidence came in a roundabout way. Last Sunday, several dice-size solids were observed at the bottom of a trench that had been dug by Phoenix's robotic arm. On Thursday, they were gone.

The only reasonable explanation, the scientists said, is that the objects were pieces of ice that evaporated into the dry Martian atmosphere through a process called sublimation. And the presence of ice means that Mars might once have had liquid water, which is essential for life — at least as it is known on Earth.

This seems to be a reasonable interpretation of the photographic evidence, which you can see for yourself on the Phoenix Mission homepage. There are definitely several objects visible in one image that are just gone in the second one. The Phoenix lander is having some unfortunate software and hardware issues at the moment. The scientists and engineers are working on resolving those issues. Hopefully, they can get definitive proof soon. But it certainly looks like they found something that behaves like water ice.

categories Space | Gaius Saturday, 21 June , 2008

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