MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Guy Webster 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov
Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov
Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson
shammond@lpl.arizona.edu
NEWS RELEASE: 2008-090 May 30, 2008
NASA'S Phoenix Lander Robotic Arm Camera Sees Possible Ice
TUCSON, Ariz.-- Scientists have discovered what may be ice that was exposed when soil was blown
away as NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars last Sunday, May 25. The possible ice appears
in an image the robotic arm camera took underneath the lander, near a footpad.
"We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be seeing exposed ice in the retrorocket blast zone,"
said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., co-investigator for the robotic arm.
"We'll test the two ideas by getting more data, including color data, from the robotic arm camera. We
think that if the hard features are ice, they will become brighter because atmospheric water vapor will
collect as new frost on the ice.
"Full confirmation of what we're seeing will come when we excavate and analyze layers in the nearby
workspace," Arvidson said.
Testing last night of a Phoenix instrument that bakes and sniffs samples to identify ingredients
identified a possible short circuit. This prompted commands for diagnostic steps to be developed and
sent to the lander in the next few days. The instrument is the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer. It
includes a calorimeter that tracks how much heat is needed to melt or vaporize substances in a
sample, plus a mass spectrometer to examine vapors driven off by the heat. The Thursday, May 29,
tests recorded electrical behavior consistent with an intermittent short circuit in the spectrometer
portion.
"We have developed a strategy to gain a better understanding of this behavior, and we have identified
workarounds for some of the possibilities," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona,
Tucson, lead scientist for the instrument.
The latest data from the Canadian Space Agency's weather station shows another sunny day at the
Phoenix landing site with temperatures holding at minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees
Fahrenheit) as the sol's high, and a low of minus 80 degrees Celsius (minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit).
The lidar instrument was activated for a 15-minute period just before noon local Mars time, and
showed increasing dust in the atmosphere.
"This is the first time lidar technology has been used on the surface of another planet," said the
meteorological station's chief engineer, Mike Daly, from MDA in Brampton, Canada. "The team is
elated that we are getting such interesting data about the dust dynamics in the atmosphere."
The mission passed a "safe to proceed" review on Thursday evening, meeting criteria to proceed with
evaluating and using the science instruments.
"We have evaluated the performance of the spacecraft on the surface and found we're ready to move
forward. While we are still investigating instrument performance such as the anomaly on TEGA
[Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer], the spacecraft's infrastructure has passed its tests and gets a
clean bill of health," said David Spencer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
deputy project manager for Phoenix.
"We're still in the process of checking out our instruments," Phoenix project scientist Leslie Tamppari
of JPL said. "The process is designed to be very flexible, to respond to discoveries and issues that
come up every day. We're in the process of taking images and getting color information that will help
us understand soil properties. This will help us understand where best to first touch the soil and then
where and how best to dig."
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona with project management at
JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from
the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of
Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological
Institute. For more about Phoenix, visit:
and
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.
-end-
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