Skip to main content

No signs of water yet from Mars lander

Scientists think Phoenix's robotic arm just needs to dig a little deeper. 'This could be the tip of the iceberg,' one says.
In its first chemical analysis of soil from Mars' northern plains, NASA's Phoenix lander has turned up no evidence of water, scientists said Monday.
Still, researchers remained confident that the craft is in the right place to uncover veins of ice believed to lie only inches beneath the surface.
A soil sample was cooked twice in one of Phoenix's eight ovens over the last few days, according to William Boynton, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. The first test reached 95 degrees, the second 350 degrees.

"Had there been any ice, it would have melted," Boynton said. "We saw no water in the soil whatsoever."

The instrument detected carbon dioxide, hardly a surprise since the thin Martian atmosphere is primarily made up of CO2.

The goal of the $420-million Phoenix mission is to find out whether Mars is, or ever was, suitable for rudimentary life forms. Phoenix landed near Mars' north pole May 25.

The science team at the University of Arizona and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La CaƱada Flintridge were not disappointed by the failure to turn up water on the first test sample. Phoenix's nearly 8-foot-long robotic arm has only dug 2 to 3 inches into the soil, at a region named Dodo-Goldilocks. The ice layer, they said, is probably farther down.

The latest images of the trench from which the soil was taken show light-toned material that the scientists think could be ice protruding from the trench's side.

"It looks like we clipped the edge of the top of a polygon," said Ray Arvidson, the lead scientist for the lander's robotic arm.

The polygonal land forms -- small mounds bounded by shallow trenches -- are similar to features that scientists have seen in the Arctic on Earth caused by subsurface ice.

"This could be the tip of the iceberg," Arvidson said.

The science team will next turn its attention to a nearby region called Wonderland, where it thinks the ice layer is close to the surface.

The TEGA ovens are designed to reach 1,800 degrees, because different elements burn off at different temperatures. Tests over the next few weeks should help uncover any water bound up with the minerals, if not water itself, scientists said.

NASA's twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have found evidence that water was once plentiful in the form of standing lakes and streams on Mars' surface.

Scientists now hope to find and test water to help determine whether present-day Mars could be habitable.

The last NASA landers to test for habitability on Mars were the twin Viking probes, which landed in 1976. Neither found any organic molecules that would be a good indicator of Mars' suitability for life.

That caused planetary scientists to virtually abandon Mars for two decades, until a new generation of scientists proposed that life-sustaining conditions might be found underground at the poles.

Scientists were encouraged by findings from the gamma ray spectrometer on the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which in 2002 detected a large concentration of hydrogen in the top few feet of soil at the pole. Scientists believed that indicated vast quantities of ice underground.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...

Obesity linked to quantity of sleep!

P eople who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new US study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said. The study is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 US adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such surveys can't prove cause-effect relationships, so - for example - it's not clear if smoking causes sleeplessn...

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...