Possible Ice II

er, dx, the animation spans 4 sols +/- a few minutes local time.

Hi dx

Re. your #20, Neither Henry nor Marsman have been heard from for several months.

Please come in if you are lurking.

There is a possibility that Phoenix might well validate some of your arguments re. life and water over the next few months.

Winston

thanks horton for the number of days confirmation in 21.

OK LWS for the plea in 22.

NASA words for the pic above,"Disappearing Ice In Color

These color images were acquired by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Surface Stereo Imager on the 21st and 25th days of the mission, or Sols 20 and 24 (June 15 and 19, 200 .

These images show sublimation of ice in the trench informally called "Dodo-Goldilocks" over the course of four days.

In the lower left corner of the left image, a group of lumps is visible. In the right image, the lumps have disappeared, similar to the process of evaporation."

So, dry-ice, water-ice vanished from the trench. A wet spot did not remain. Expected sublimation took place.

No water traces detected from the oven snifters. Wouldn't that make it CO2 then?

Now what>>>more Arms shovels and ovens?

yt
dx

The reason no water has shown up in the ovens is that the sample material was "left out" for so long that any "very small" sized hunks of ice would sublimate away before the sample got into the oven. The next sample should have "fresh dirt" to feed into the next oven and ice should be in that which when the oven turns on will evaporate as a gas that the instrument can then analyze. Unfortunately, the next oven door has had the same problem as the first -- only worse -- and there's but a very very thin slot of an opening to get the next sample's dirt into. The oven doors are opened by a spring clip, and if it doesn't work, there's no immediate solution except banging it with the shovel or trying to use the shaking of the oven's screen to vibrate the oven door open more -- this was tried with the first oven door and it didn't work. It is now considered a very big problem with the remaining ovens. Someone didn't see this coming in all the research on Earth as they designed those ovens. Could be anything, but if they don't find a workaround, it could be a significant lessening of the science that can be done.

dx,

these comparisons that are so popular today, really do not seem to be very convincing. As much as ice, it can be dust with absorbed H2O or CO2, whch changes shape as the agent sublimates.

The underlander stereo that Horton produced, is absolutely convincing as to showing icy swell.

And it does not change - so the conclusion probably must be, that actual ice does not change and that the comparison is misleading.

eS

3D animation sol 25-28 changes:

For those who doubt that the ice is water ice, there is a good new summary on the Phoenix blog about why they have come to this conclusion:

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/blogsPost.php?bID=211

The CCD camera showed a water-type spectrum of the white patches. TEGA didn't see any ice because the sample sat out in the open sun for a few days before finally being dumped into the oven; any ice would have sublimated away already. Plus, it's not currently cold enough for CO2 ice and salts don't sublimate.

well, it is cold enough for c02 ice during some parts of the day... due to temperature fluctuations

hmm, actually I doubt there is any co2 ice during any part of the day, at the location of phoenix... makes me wonder how cold it must be at the poles...

sol 8 - 22 changes on the lander leg:

YIKES!

Full frame animation here.

The white stuff on the leg seen just after the landing was a puzzzle.

Now it is an even bigger puzzle! What are these things?

Ice nucleation around soil splattered on the leg during landing?

What does this imply about the soil?

I wonder if we will see Mars icicles?!

Mars. Damn weird place.

Thanks for that Hort. Great find.

Bob Clark

gotta be h20 ice

horton>>>

I noticed these sprinklings on the leg before.

Not that much of a change, just different light shifting reflections off those particles on the leg.

Could be paint blisters on the leg from the Phoenix thrusters. Here on Earth in Architecture and building technology we use intumescent paint coatings to exposed steel and other metals as a protectorate from fire. I have used it on several large open air structures like airport interiors and warehouses. When a fire erupts the paint swells to encapsulate the overhead beams and more importantly the steel columns so people can evacuate the premises safely. There are several methods of application. Perhaps it is too cold to perform thoroughly and blisters formed!

Don't know the finishing specs for the Phoenix landing legs.

yt
dx

horton re:30 ,dx re:33,

I had an impression initially, that those are results of reflection of the soil at the leg surface. dx'es suggestion is an another possibility.
If it were H2O ice, it seemingly would contradict the notion that specks of ice have evaporated over couple days in the trench.

Would it?

eS

extrasense

It's the good old garden soil with lots of binding humus and moisture (originally quickly freed by the rocket thrusters and splattered on the legs)

The original soil has stayed there and formed nucleation centres for the ice/frost that hort has shown us.

Winston

sol 8-31 changes to ice under lander:

Sigh.

There has been a decrease in the brightness and increase in surface roughness of the ice in sunlight under the lander.

An similar image 50 minutes earlier on sol 31 with only a 1.5 millisecond difference in exposure shows the same changes to the ice with different lighting.

OK, how about this? The ice in sunlight is sublimating and then condensing on a cold metalic surface nearby.

Water that splattered and froze during landing on the legs in shadow is now serving as nucleation points for additional ice buildup.

Curiously, some of the bright splatters have gotten dimmer? What's special about them? Maybe they were originally CO2 slush -- which has now completely sublimated?

I am NOT convinced that there is not some CO2 ice still in the soil.

Listen guys, how long does it take a block of frozen CO2 to sublimate at 0C? Now drop the temperature to -80C. Now how long? Now move the block into shadow in a vacuum -- or partial vacuum like Mars. Now how long?

Remember, in space the temperature difference between sunlight and shadow can be ginormous.

What's that? The Martian surface is not "space"? Really? It's pretty damn close.

LWS, re35,

Thanks for streightening out my wandering mind

EXtrasense

Just speculating! But the news from the analyses all seem to be tending towards finally documenting a Mars surface that could have been easily envisioned by accepting the Levin VIking results and by not interpreting all the subsequent data gathered on Mars in terms of the spurious superoxidant explanations that were cobbled together to scuttle those resulta and were accepted hook line and sinker by the scientific establishment.

We'll see, as further results come in from the TEGA and Atomic Force Microscope instruments.

Winston

LWS,

have somebody said that a greenhouse on Mars, with the air enriched a bit with Oxigen, can provide asparagus and the rest of it?

es

Once again Hort, you're the main for Phoenix imaging.
Certainly looks like changes to that large white block over that time period.
To fix this more firmly NASA needs to take an image of the white block at the same time of day and with the robot arm camera at the same position as with the sol 8 image.

Bob Clark