They've hit the ice layer so they're not going to be able to get any deeper. No real reason to, besides.

The top of the ice layer was scraped during the last sol:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_10878.jpg

Just a casual glance at the calendar. The primary mission's more than half over, and while the mission isn't sure to end on the last day, it's sure not to last TOO much longer, and could even end sooner with partial hardware failures (beyond those already seen).

Color me pessimistic, just a tad, but I'm starting to get the feeling I have when my sports teams are trailing and the time on the clock ticks down. Still plenty of time left for everything good to happen, but I'm not sure if the dark clouds are accumulating faster than the silver linings.

Some good science has been had, but we really need to get some results on the ice, and get the best possible search for organics on at least one sample of soil, but preferably definitely more than one sample in case the putative organics may be fleeing surface strata for lower down.

I know that a nice, crisp schedule of digging and dumping will carry the day, but the time to do this is a little less slack than it was on Sol #1.

What is this and why does the Phoenix team image it every week or so with 10+ images each?

thanks in advance (...doug)

Click to view attachment

I had to ask as well... it's a ceramic blank that they can call on to hack into with the arm rasp, and do a tega run on to establish an independent 'blank' for organics etc.

Doug

Doug,

Thanks! You're the man!

Cheers

But that doesn't answer why they keep imaging it.

Monitoring dust deposition?

I guess so - it's probably the only 'known ' surface of the lander that isn't covered in bloody magnets

Doug

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_10878.jpg

That looks like a rasp (radula) mark in the front of this trench
Roy

Could be. If so, I wonder if it is an incidental mark made by a non-operating rasp, or if this represents the purposeful use of a functioning rasp.

Yeah, I'm with you. Potentially 6 operable ovens left, half the mission time gone and no apparent sense of urgency. Ahh well. The buck stops with them and I guess the the view is a bit distorted from my armchair.

I'm not too worried. With the next TEGA run perhaps the last, I'll guess that the team is trying to carefully plan a flurry of activity to deliver the most ice-rich sample possible to the oven. I'll bet when it happens, things will move very, very quickly.

(I expect a sudden switch to a carefully planned "Hurry-up offense" )

I agree, Mike. If I feel any sort of letdown it's from the decreasing coverage and more infrequent briefings (which of course is just a product of how long it's been since landing now), but not the mission itself. Glass half full!

Speaking of "hurry-up offense," JPL has issued a new release:

[LINK]

I have to admit to some confusion. Some reports state clearly that the short circuit and it's effects are confined to the single oven. Others indicate that vibrating the mesh for the next sample may cause a short circuit terminating all capability. Anyone know the real story? What was the nature of the short and what is the failure mode/effects flowing from it?

I quote this post to illustrate a rather important change in the Phoenix website.

Note the base URL above -- http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

Guess what? If you go to the home page based on that URL, you get redirected to:

http://phoenix-web.jpl.nasa.gov/

The University of Arizona seems to no longer be hosting their own Phoenix website!

And by the way -- this makes every single link we have in here to images at the original URL base broken.

-the other Doug

Seems to be back up now.

In 3D that trench is starting to look like a burial pit...!

Hope it's not a grave for TEGA they're digging!

*ducks and runs for cover*

More likely a grave for the guy who "didn't build it to specifications"...

Quick color composites:


Sol 42, pre-scrape on the left, sol 43 post-scrape on the right.

And a cropped and zoomed flicker gif between the two:

Given that there appears to be a layer of ice under the regolith, as the kids say, how deep is the ice likely to be? Is it possible that it's a frozen ocean?

I read that analysis of the ice by Phoenix can tell if the ice is from a frozen ocean or water deposited from the atmosphere. I don't know how. As far as the depth is concerned, I wonder if MRO or Mars Express have been or will be of any help there. I don't recall seeing any info on that... but I mostly just read press releases and this forum.

There is a marvellous deep radar section of the polar ice from Mars Express. I'll try to find the link but somebody'll probably beat me to it. EDIT: that should of course say MRO.
Here it is:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/mult...d-20080515.html

Looks like the ice is tougher than expected. Some great science has been done but I worry the second half of the mission might go a bit shakesperian....

Did they have a press conference? Didn't see one listed on the web site... going on two weeks now. Rumors of an epidemic at Clavius?

Not for me. Not even getting the redirect, now -- just your basic 404 error.

-the other Doug

No press conference seems to be in the offing this week. I just called and got a detailed update from Mark Lemmon. The first part of the press release makes it sound as though the digging is tougher than expected, but then it goes on to quote Ray as saying it's what they expected. I think it's more accurate to say that digging is tough, but not tougher than they expected. Perhaps tougher than they had hoped.

--Emily

I've seen the polar cap stuff, but nothing on the circumpolar, subsurface ice.

Your blog is the best source of news of late!

PS caught your tutorial on how to get started in manipulating planetary raw images--excellent. Just the thing for the Planetary Society to be doing.

Well you most likely have seen this, but here is a version that does show a section on the left that lies outside the cap. Not much layering and no clear bottom to that unit to be sure. Is it the same as the base unit marked 'BU' underneath the presumed base of the cap? It doesn't look the same in character, but it seems to continue at the same level on the section. I wonder just how distinct is the boundary between polar cap ice and the ice both underneath and around it? Presumably the polar cap has moved around and shrunk and grown in rather drastic ways over geological timescales.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/227416m...ps_fig1_rgb.tif

Kathryn Fishbaugh did some good work on the north polar cap. Pre MRO results but well worth the read.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/sixthmars2003/pdf/3141.pdf

The MRO site sets an age for the North Polar ice cap (layering above the basal unit) of 4 million years based on layer counts. I would anticipate some significant margin of error on that method but the current cap is a recent phenomona. As I understand it the Maxwell time for Mars could be as high as 10 million years which makes me wonder about previous comments indicating that the lack of deflection in the sub-ice basement indicates an very thick, inelastic lithosphere (leaving aside any Tharsis bulge arguments). I am sure they have data on the expected ice thickness at the Phoenix site. I just can't find where it is presented.

Some what related in finding water out there. It seems the Moon has had it for a long time:

New scans show evidence of water on the moon

" Tiny green and orange glass balls brought back from the moon nearly 40 years ago by astronauts show evidence that water existed there from the very beginning, scientists reported on Wednesday.

They used a new method of analyzing elements in the lunar sand samples to show strong evidence of water, dating back 3 billion years."

"Their study, published in the journal Nature, could support evidence that water persists in shadowed craters on the moon's surface -- and that the water could be native to the moon and not carried there by comets."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080709/sc_nm/moon_water_dc_1

Apples and oranges.

Water on the moon is certainly interesting. In fact, it's being discussed here.

Here's two comparison blinks of Snow Queen, sol 21 - 44 taken from slightly different positions and angles. I didn't have much luck overlaying the two views on each other, hence the separate animations. Some of the changes are clearly real like the moving sand grains and some of the changes are lighting differences like upper left corner of 21 B (the sol 44 images were taken ~ 15 minutes earlier in the sol). The rest are less clear...cracks, trails of rolling particles, or shadows?:
Snow Queen A
Snow Queen B

A color analgyph of the ground, deeper than it looks to be.


And a view with a piece of solar pan, and the horizon (actualy, a small part of the Peter Pan)

Don't know why you say Apples and oranges.

This may prove that water exisited in ALL our solar system bodies during the time of their formation and did not come from comets colliding with said bodies INCLUDING Mars..

To consider the missing link, in many ways, between Mars and the Moon, think about Phobos. It matches Mars's distance from the Sun exactly, and while lacking that thin but potentially crucial whisper of atmosphere that Mars has, it may maintain ice at depth better than the Moon. After seeing the MRO images of Phobos, I wondered if it doesn't deserve to be on the list of places where we could hunt for life. (And I'd have no reason not to include Deimos in the same breath.) Is 7 mb of CO2 really a crucial difference? I admit, having the simplest organic molecule be ubiquitous sounds like a nice boon to biology, but then, might Phobos have some slow outgassing of CO2 as well?

bcory, I was not trying to be dismissive of your post, so I apologize if it sounded that way. I think the latest find is very interesting and worthy of a lot more study to try and determine exactly *how* this water got there. It has big implications for us (potentially) as we return to the moon. And yes, you're right, it might have implications for other bodies in our solar system as well and our level of understanding their formation.

It's just that the scale and scope of water's history on the moon and on Mars is vastly different. Hence the "apples and oranges" comment. On Mars we're talking about possible past oceans, ground water, flooding events, even transient water outbursts today. On the moon we're talking about... well, nobody is really sure what we're talking about yet.

And besides, this doesn't have to do with Phoenix, which is why I linked to the thread that's specifically about the topic you brought up.

I may be out on a limb here, but I think the bestest simplest organic molecule (for life anyway) might be methane (CH4).

CO2 is all oxidized up. You need to put big energy into the system to reduce it down to start building complex biomolecules.
CH4 is a better start point. You can go downhill to get "oxidized" and build up bigger useful stuff (For example: 2CH4 --> CH3CH3 + H2 is technically an oxidation of the carbon atom)

The other thing you would need would be a redox couple down deep. (I'm assuming surface photosynthesis wouldn't be the first option on Phobos.) So some type of reservoir of sulfur or phosphorous or some other handy electron reservoir that could be used as redox "food" to drive the biosynthetic reactions.

So yeah, having water for a solvent, an easy redox couple and a good source of carbon feedstock would be pretty good ingredients for life, in my opinion.

At this point, I wouldn't rule out any planetary body having deep life. [I'm still not so sure about Io, however.]

-Mike

Excellent work, Dan. When I saw the new Snow Queen images come down, I went to work trying to do exacty what you did. My results were not as nice as yours.

So, wouldn't we have expected to see more significant changes to that surface if this is truly ice? If the water ice sublimation rates for the Phoenix location that I've seen posted in this forum are even approximately correct, we should have noticed more significant changes to this outcrop between sol 21 and 44, if it was indeed composed of ice. It "looks" so much like the expected ice to me that I am not certain how to reconcile these time lapse images with my Martian expectations.

What do we know about 'contaminated' water ice sublimation in Martian conditions? Does much change due to salts or sand in the ice. The sublimation rate would surely be different if ice was more like icecrete (more sand than ice), would it?

Just how much solar energy is actually getting to the ice under the lander and in the trench? If my memory serves the sublimation of a cubic centimeter of ice takes 720 calories or just over 3 kilojoules. The regolith also seems to be a much better insulator than previous models would have us believe else there would not be ice so near the surface.

There could be a lump that apparently disintegrated in Dan's GIF. Strange that it seems to be the only one and there without direct solar radiation, isn't it.

There is a change there, but according to Slinted's dated images of Snow Queen A and Snow Queen B, the lump was absent on Sol 21 and appeared on Sol 44. Perhaps some debris from the excavation project going on nearby?

Steve M

I made the exact same mistake when I looked at them (even to the point of doubting myself again later, and double checking that I hadn't switched the sol labels).

Oops, you're right, did only look at the slightly brighter spot then where the lump appears and mixxed it up.

Btw. what's up with http://www.met.tamu.edu/mars/directory.html The site seems to be entirely offline.

Here is my take on the sol 21 to 44 changes to the ice under the lander.

The images were registered with a double affine registration ( effectively six point registration ) and then brightness matched, so I think you can believe any changes you see -- including shape changes to the ice mass. The sol 21 image was the one transformed, so it has a slight loss in sharpness.

My suggestion would be that one of the blobs of "dirt" that were plastered over the lander legs (and, by implication, the lower deck) has fallen down to the ground.

I'm rather more interested in a different blob to right of centre that appears to have "moved"...

You can see the mark made by the TECP on sol 43,
before: http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/pho...4_14C60MDM1.jpg
after: http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/data/pho...0_14C66MDM1.jpg

Phew... catching up on things here after being AFUMSF for two days... combination of no internet connection thanks to the latest Windows-update-from-hell, and a visit to my mum's, whose PC was affected also... thanks SO much Mr Gates....

Anyway... seems like an interesting couple of days! Some nice scenic shots again... I heard another piece on the TV the other night (I think it was Chris Lintott on The Sky at Night) describing the landing site as "flat" and "featureless"... yet whenever I see a view like this the words "rolling" and "countryside" spring to mind...

Click to view attachment