Very very significant photo!

Sorry about the link to fox news; but the engine of the lander has blown off soil to reveal ICE!. Thats ICE as in H2O. Betcha they'll find some bio crawlies within it....

Here is the link

[link]

Haven't had the time to access the news link, but here is a HiRISE wintertime photo of the Heimdall crater vicinity with a small crater nearby showing a fully covered, perhaps a nearly filled, interior bowl.
The obvious is that ice makes a passage across this area as it does in the Arctic and Antarctic on Earth, blowing along in the wind, drifting as a well self-lubricating mechanism in a travel that can travel until it strikes other fixed ice, where it is bound to the fixed ice mass as a single crystalline structure by the supersaturated atmospheric conditions. The ice is incorporated at the current fixed ice spots, rather than the 'loose' snow crystals we are accustomed to on Earth.
Here the ice has a 'mousetrap' crater bowl deposit to build upon, and has accumulated a substantial depth.
This HiRISE original image, PSP_005717_2485, was taken around Heimdall crater near the landing area in the Martian winter-time.
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The image shows a section of the large HiRISE image at 1 to 8, the red magnified section at 1 to 1. Winter ice.

of course its ice..what's the big surprise?

tell NASA to go find the lakes.

Looking at the sides of parts of the lander legs we can see the long term effect of the Martian weather and atmosphere on the 'splatter' droplets which are viewable in photos. As ice, it should be a valuable study in the question of surface water liquid and ice in the stability upon exposure. We may be readjusting the concept of immediate sublimation, standing liquid bodies at the open surface, and the stasis of the 'ice table', or water table, upon heating.
If this was tested first, as chemistry, it might taint the minor constituent chemistry of the unaffected Mars ice which has an important history tied to it's contents.
How much of the lander leg frozen droplets will disappear over time? How much of this material was hydrazine and related lander thruster chemistry not vaporized or blown away? Why no better imaging of the ice as yet?

Immediate sublimation. With 100 percent relative humidity, I doubt sublimation would BE immediate. I've brought back more than ONE suitcase full of very damp clothes, returning from the Yucatan.

Dana,
And you think that the particles on the elander leg are ice because.....?

could be frozen co2