From: baalke{at}familynet-international.net

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-090

NASA'S Phoenix Lander Robotic Arm Camera Sees Possible Ice Jet Propulsion Laboratory
May 30, 2008

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:
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Media contacts: Guy Webster 818-354-5011 Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. guy.webster{at}jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown{at}nasa.gov

Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson
shammond{at}lpl.arizona.edu

2008-090
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