Successful New Landing on Mars

And look, you photoshop'd your head onto a space suit, how cute. We didn't think you had the skills.

By rasping to icy soil, the robotic arm on Phoenix proved it could flatten the layer where soil meets ice, exposing the icy flat surface below the soil. Scientists can now proceed with plans to scoop and scrape samples into Phoenix's various analytical instruments. Scientists will test samples to determine if some ice in the soil may have been liquid in the past during warmer climate cycles.

More and more, I'm believing something like self sustaining domed settlements may be possible on Mars. I don't have the expertise to think about changing the atmosphere there to mirror that of the Earth, but it's an exciting thought.

If conditions for life on Mars continue to be this good (see article below), is there a point at which we actually expect to see find evidence of past life on Mars?

And if Mars turns out to be just as "pregnant" with pre-biotic conditions as Earth was, but we DON'T find evidence for life, then we may have to rethink just how lucky it might have been that life ever began on Earth.

I hope it's not a re-run of the Florida property boom of the mid twenties.

There are some remarkable similarities. Mainly the gullibility of a portion of the public.

Mars had the water. But, were conditions right for a long enough period of time for the evolutionary process to proceed?

Judging from that article, it's beginning to look like it.

Does Mars have a magnetic field sufficient to deflect most cosmic radiation?

No, it does not. And that's a good point (a key difference between the two planets).

However the early Earth didn't have any ozone, the lack of which allowed a large amount of cosmic radiation to reach the surface, and life still arose. And I think that cosmic radiation is actually beneficial to certain chemical reactions which result in much of the prebiotic "soup".

Campbell's dont sell that and if Campbell's dont sell it it cant be much cop.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Works Through The Night

July 21, 2008 -- To coordinate with observations made by an orbiter flying repeatedly overhead, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is working a schedule Monday that includes staying awake all night for the first time.

Phoenix is using its weather station, stereo camera and conductivity probe to monitor changes in the lower atmosphere and ground surface at the same time NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter studies the atmosphere and ground from above.

The lander's fork-like thermal and conductivity probe was inserted into the soil Sunday for more than 24 hours of measurements coordinated with the atmosphere observations. One goal is to watch for time-of-day changes such as whether some water alters from ice phase to vapor phase and enters the atmosphere from the soil.

"We are looking for patterns of movement and phase change," said Michael Hecht, lead scientist for Phoenix's Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, which includes the conductivity probe. "The probe is working great. We see some changes in soil electrical properties, which may be related to water, but we're still chewing on the data."

The extended work shift for the lander began Sunday afternoon Pacific Time. In Mars time at the landing site, it lasts from the morning of Phoenix's 55th Martian day, or sol, to the afternoon of its 56th sol.

The Phoenix team's plans for Sol 56 also include commanding the lander to conduct additional testing of the techniques for collecting a sample of icy soil. When the team is confident about the collecting method, it plans to use Phoenix's robotic arm to deliver an icy sample to an oven of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA).

The TEGA instrument successfully opened both doors Saturday for the oven chosen to get the first icy sample. Images from the Surface Stereo Camera confirmed that the doors are wide open.

NASA Confirms Water On Mars
Laboratory experiments aboard NASA's Phoenix lander have confirmed the existence of water on Mars for the first time, the space agency announced Thursday.

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the onboard experiment that confirmed the discovery. He said that while other probes had found evidence for water on the Red Planet, this was "the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."

The test sample was heated after being brought into the Phoenix lander's lab by its robotic arm on Wednesday. Scientists say the chemical test confirms the presence of ice near the Martian north pole.

Until now, photos of hard splotchy areas on the surface near the Phoenix landing site were the only evidence for ice.

Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic on May 25 on a three-month digging mission. NASA on Thursday said it was extending the mission another two months.

Wow! That's seemingly such a small statement, but so cool!

I am believing now that water exists in lots of places we never imagined before.

just to be clear, they do specifically mean WATER ice, yes?

The press realease calls it real water.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander may have found water ice on the red planet, but it still has a lot of work left to do to answer the question that has been on scientists' minds for decades: Has Mars ever been capable of harboring life?

Phoenix scientists announced yesterday that the mission finally confirmed the presence of subsurface water ice in the north polar regions of Mars ?- first detected by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter in 2002 ?- about two months after touching down on the Martian surface on May 25.

The lander is now analyzing the ice to see if it was ever a liquid and if it contains organic materials, the building blocks of life.

The ice, collected from below the surface at the lander's site in the Martian arctic, could have acted like a freezer, protecting any organics that may have formed there.

"We have an environment where organics could be preserved," said mission scientist William Boynton of the University of Arizona.

The detection of organics on Mars would not necessarily mean there is life. It would just mean that carbon and other molecules that make up life as we know it were present.

"Organics would be the home run or the grand slam of the mission," said Bruce Jakosky, a geologist at the University of Colorado who is not affiliated with the mission. However, if they don't find organics, "that doesn't mean that there wasn't life on Mars," Jakosky said. Other missions, planned and unplanned, will keep the search alive.

Liquid water
The confirmation of the Odyssey ice observations was a key goal of the $420 million Phoenix mission, but only the first of several steps in characterizing the dirt and ice layer of Mars' Vastitas Borealis region to determine whether it may once have been habitable at some point in the planet's past.

'I see this as a step along the way of Phoenix getting to its major science results," Jakosky said. "By itself, that's not a major result."

One of those steps is determining whether the water ice ever existed in a liquid form, said Phoenix robotic arm co-investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis ?- liquid water being a key resource for life as we know it.

Phoenix will look for signs of ancient liquid water by heating up samples of the icy dirt mixture in the tiny ovens of its Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), which can analyze the vapors given off by the heated samples to analyze their composition.

TEGA has already begun heating up the sample that confirmed that the rock-hard layer beneath the surface dirt was indeed water ice ?- when ice begins to melt, it takes more heat to raise the temperature of the sample. Over the course of the next week, TEGA will gradually heat the sample all the way up to 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius).

As the sample is heated, any hydrated minerals, or those that likely formed in the presence of liquid water, show themselves as they break apart and the signature of their water is detected by the instrument, explained Boynton, a TEGA co-investigator.

Finding hydrated minerals, such as carbonates, sulfates or clays, would indicate that liquid water once permeated the Martian regolith where Phoenix now sits, Arvidson said in a telephone interview last night.

This water would not have flowed as rivers or streams, as it once likely did closer to Mars' equator, where hydrated salts have already been found by NASA orbiters and rovers, but would have percolated through the dirt layer as Mars' orbital motions tipped the northern parts of the planet toward the sun, warming them up, Arvidson added.

The stuff of life
The other big signature Phoenix will look for as the mission continues and the probe's ovens heat up dirt samples will be organic molecules, the building blocks of life.

"Finding organics would really change our way of thinking," Boynton said.

But so far, organic molecules haven't shown up on Mars. When the Viking landers heated up dirt samples in the 1970s, "there were really no organic molecules at all," Boynton said.

But dirt near the Martian equator faces strong oxidizing pressures, which can destroy organics, Boynton added, which is why Phoenix is looking for them farther north.

Organics have proven elusive to Phoenix so far; the first dirt sample analyzed by TEGA, taken from the surface, found no sign of them. But this wasn't much of a surprise to mission scientists.

"We didn't really expect to find them in the surface soils," because the surface is subjected to the same oxidizing pressure as the equatorial regions, Boynton told SPACE.com.

TEGA will keep looking for signs of organics in subsequent samples taken closer to the ice layer, he added.

If Phoenix doesn't find organics, the mission won't be a flop, Jakosky said, because it still gives scientists valuable information about the northern region. "Whatever they find is exciting," he said.

If it does detect organics though, mission scientists will be cautious about interpreting the findings, Boynton said. They would assume first that any organics could be contamination brought with the spacecraft from Earth. Mission scientists will check with a "blank" brought from Earth to determine whether or not any organics discovered are terrestrial stowaways.

Even if the blank shows that the organics came from the Martian soil, they still may not be native, Boynton said, since the same organic-bearing meteorites that strike Earth strike Mars as well. Determining the ultimate origin of any organics would likely take bringing back a sample to Earth, a project that both NASA and the European Space Agency are working toward.

And organics don't on their own equal life. "Just because there are organic compounds, doesn't mean that that's life," said Kim Seelos, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

Future missions
Whether or not Phoenix finds signs of organics, it won't be the last time that NASA looks for them on Mars. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), set to launch in 2009, will pick up where the 1970s Viking missions left off, exploring the regions closer to the equator for signs of them.

MSL will be better equipped than Viking, and even Phoenix, to detect organics in dirt samples, with more powerful and sensitive equipment, as well as the ability to roam around.

While "life is teeming on Earth," Arvidson said, it may not have been so dense on Mars ?- if it ever existed ?- perhaps only forming in small pockets. Since Phoenix, as a lander, stays put by definition, it can only explore the patch of ground in its immediate vicinity.

However, any organics detected by MSL would have formed in a much more ancient period of Mars' history because the landscape near Mars' equator formed billions of years ago. The surface that Phoenix is exploring is much younger, only tens of millions of years old.

For now, Phoenix is the only chance of finding organics on this region of Mars, since no future missions in the works now are planned to return to the frozen northern reaches. To get another mission back there to look the region in greater detail, "it would probably take finding organics," Boynton said.

But "Phoenix isn't the last gasp, or MSL isn't the last gasp" to answering the question of whether life ever existed on Mars, Jakosky said.

The evidence available to scientists now suggests that Mars could have harbored life, it's just a matter of finding a spot that preserves the signs of it, he added. And Phoenix's landing site, or even MSL's, may not be the ideal spot to go and look for those signs, whether by sending another rover or staging a mission to return a sample to Earth.

There are plenty of other environments on Mars where Jakosky would like to look for signs of life. While he can't point to a particular spot, there is evidence that Mars once had features that could have supported life, including ancient lake beds, ancient highlands where evidence suggests that water existed for long periods of time, and hot springs ?- "places like Yellowstone," as Jakosky describes them.

Some scientists, such as Seelos, doubt that clear evidence of Martian life itself will ever be found because any life would have likely been microbial, which is not easily preserved as fossils. But Jakosky sees this as an "unnecessarily pessimistic" view, because ancient microbes have been preserved in some places on Earth.

What exactly do they mean by "organics"? Are they looking for amino acids, or proteins or what?