[meteorite-list] Camera on Arm Looks Beneath Phoenix Lander

[Ron Baalke]

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

Camera on Arm Looks Beneath NASA Mars Lander
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
May 31, 2008

A view of the ground underneath NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander adds to
evidence that descent thrusters dispersed overlying soil and exposed a
harder substrate that may be ice.

The image received Friday night from the spacecraft's Robotic Arm Camera
shows patches of smooth and level surfaces beneath the thrusters.

"This suggests we have an ice table under a thin layer of loose soil,"
said the lead scientist for the Robotic Arm Camera, Horst Uwe Keller of
Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.

"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."

The Phoenix mission is led by Smith at the University of Arizona with
project management by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., 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.