NASA has just announced that a photo taken by the Phoenix lander of the ground under it may show patches of ice! You can see in the image below the shiny patches where the overlying soil was blown away when Phoenix landed. That shiny stuff may be rock, but it looks a lot like ice.

“We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for Phoenix. “The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.”

In the meantime, if you’ve got an LCD monitor with 1680 x 1050 resolution, check out this wallpaper I colorized of the image from Phoenix.

Back in 1978, JPL scientists were puzzling over some photos sent by the Mars Viking Lander:

Analysis of three component color pictures taken by the Viking lander camera on Mars has established color differences for the background material, the rocks and spots on the rocks. Changes in the location of greenish rock patches and ground patterns have been observed over time. A combination of wind movement of dust and dirt dropped by sampler arm operations could have produced the slight changes in pattern and position. However, the observed patches, patterns and changes could also be attributable to biological activity. Analysis of six component color data on the same scene confirms the observations including the greenish color of the rock patches. [My emphasis]

The report was unable to say for sure what the greenish patches were, but they tried in some ingenious ways to verify that what Viking was sending actually was the color green. Obviously they weren’t able to conclude that the patches were some form of life or we wouldn’t still be looking.

That said, take a look at this portion of an image from the Phoenix Mars Lander just released yesterday by NASA:

Looks green to me. Bear in mind that the images were taken using infrared and violet filters, the staff at JPL had to process images from Phoenix, inferring “from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter,” to create the colors you see, so the green could still be a mistake.

But if it isn’t a mistake, what could it be? Debris kicked up by Phoenix’s landing should be reddish, not green, anyway you don’t see any green in a similar image from the Mars Spirit Rover.

Since NASA sent Phoenix to Vastitas Borealis, the arctic plains of the Martian North Pole, to investigate “whether the site could once have supported microbial life on Mars", they must hope to detect life in some form. I’m guessing they don’t expect it to be complex forms like lichen, but it could happen.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’ve got an LCD monitor with 1680 x 1050 resolution, check out this wallpaper I made of colorized images from Phoenix.

Update: I’m still looking into this. I found this article about Spirit Mars Rover having photographed some shiny green rocks that turned out to be Olivine, but the Phoenix pic doesn’t look much like the description of Olivine.

Update: Found this image taken by Mars Spirit when it explored Gusev Crater. The bluish-green rocks in Gusev may be similar to what Phoenix photographed, in which case it’s probably not some form of life. Still can’t say for sure though, as the Phoenix image shows the green arranged in clumps of very small somethings mixed in with the stones, unlike the Gusev Crater photo where the greenish stones are scattered about.

 

phoenix mars lander