Discovery prompts NASA to extend project, spend another $2 million

“Follow the water” has been the mantra of Peter Smith, principal investigator of the Phoenix Mars Lander mission led by the University of Arizona.

The pursuit paid off.

Martian water was conclusively found in the form of frozen H2O, Smith announced Thursday, and said researchers are eager to use a mission extension by NASA to seek additional evidence that the planet could support or could have supported life.

“Our science team is fully convinced this is H2O,” Smith said. “We have looked at the data for a day now and we are convinced that this is ice.”

The Lander’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer detected frozen water in a soil sample scooped and analyzed this week, said William Boynton, lead scientist for TEGA.

Mission scientists had said that the observed change from solid to gas of exposed hard, shiny material showed the stuff was ice. The new results offer conclusive proof, Boynton said.

“We’ve now finally touched it and tasted it,” Boynton said. “From my point of view, it tastes very fine.”

Champagne corks popped Wednesday at the Tucson Science Operations Center near Stone Avenue and Drachman Street when scientists saw the analyzer results, said Boynton. He donned a pointy witch hat at Thursday’s briefing, likening the Martian ice melting in the analyzer oven to water melting the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”

The analyzer, which heats soil and ice samples up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and analyzes the gases given off, used a mass spectrometer to detect H2O in the sample and found energy levels jumped at the melting point at which ice changes state, Boynton said.

The baking takes about four – not necessarily consecutive – days. It could be three to four weeks before researchers analyze all the data from the most recently tested sample, Boynton said.

Additional heating of the soil sample could reveal evidence of other elements of life, which include carbon and hydrogen, Boynton said.

The sample tested this week was primarily soil. Mission scientists are working to deliver a sample richer in ice to the analyzer.

Two attempts in the past week saw icy material – rasped, scraped and collected from a hard-as-concrete layer about 2 inches deep – fail to be sprinkled from the Lander’s robotic arm scoop into an oven opening.

NASA also announced Thursday that funding had been approved to extend the Phoenix mission from a planned 90 sols, or Martian days, to 124 sols. A Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds long.

The Lander arrived on Mars May 25 and was in the 67th Earth day of its mission Thursday.

Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., announced at Thursday’s briefing that the $420 million mission will get a $2 million funding boost for the extension, which runs through Sept. 30.

“The mission is going very well; it’s been proving very successful,” Meyer said. “The mission has already met minimum mission success and we are pretty close to meeting full mission success.”

It appears that the mission, which depends on solar panels for energy, will have enough power to continue until November, he said.

With 25 days remaining in the prime 90-sol mission, the Lander has six of its eight single-use TEGA ovens and and two of its four wet chemistry labs in the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer still available for use, Meyer said.

“It’s going to be helpful to have more time to complete the analysis with the idea of using all eight TEGA ovens,” Boynton said.

Plans call for using the robotic arm scoop to dig two new trenches for collecting samples for the Lander’s scientific instruments to analyze, Smith said. Two trenches are already providing soil for testing.

The mission extension will be valuable for Lander’s weather station, said Victoria Hipkin, a scientist with the Phoenix Meteorological Station operated by the Canadian Space Agency.

The weather station has been offering daily reports since the mission began, she said.

The Lander is working in the planet’s northern arctic region, which will be dark and covered in frozen carbon dioxide when winter arrives.

“For atmospheric science, the longer the mission lasts, the better,” she said. “We can now follow the seasonal changes.”

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More on Mars

Citizen’s Mars page: www.tucsoncitizen.com/mars

Phoenix Mars Lander mission Web site: phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

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