Phoenix finds water!

Unsurprisingly...

The soil is as I suspected packed full of ice and a lot of salt. The white stuff is a mixture of mainly salt with a little ice while the red stuff is dust with ice - the ratio varies because first of all the stuff on the surface will be drier because of the sun and low pressure, and secondly, because Phoenix has contaminated the site, turning over the topsoil and adding ice during its landing.

While the little lumps in the "Dodo" trench are definitely ice - because they disappeared, the stuff under the lander probably isn't.

Here is a picture taken by the lander on Sol 6 of a weird rock under the lander.

Is it ice? It looks as if it could be, particularly with those holes... but it isn't. Here is the rock on Sol 19

Spot the difference? No neither can I. Despite being in the sun occasionally (as is shown by the patch of sunlight at the top of the Sol 19 picture) the rock is unchanged. Had it been ice or even icy I would have expected it to have changed as it slowly evaporated away.

So now what?

Well baking some of the icy soil would be a good idea, but I don't think anyone has worked out how to get the stuff into the oven as the soil is “strangely clumpy” and “sticky”.

I am sticking by my ice-cream scoop analogy. The soil is like ice-cream straight from the freezer. Deep frozen ice-cream doesn't look particularly wet, but stick an ice-cream scoop into it and then try to get the ice-cream off the scoop - you can't - why?

Because the scoop being warmer melts a thin layer of ice-cream it is in contact with, and then because the ice-cream is so cold it freezes the melted ice-cream and the metal in the scoop's temperature falls to the same level as the ice-cream and the ice acts as glue. The only way to get the ice-cream of the scoop (on Earth) is to wait for the ambient temperature to beat the ice-cream’s and to warm the scoop to melt the ice glue.

I believe that the surface of the TEGA ovens is warmer that the air and soil temperature - because of the sunshine and possibly because of thermal leakage from the internal workings of the Phoenix.

When the icy soil hits the oven doors and grill it melts and instantly freezes sticking to the metal in the same way as deep frozen ice-cream does to the ice-cream scoop... On Mars it is very very cold, so there is no way the ice-metal glue is going to re-melt as it would on earth, but as the pictures at the start of this blog show, on Mars ice evaporates straight from ice to water vapour without going through the liquid phase – because of the low pressure.