- 22:38 31 July 2008
- NewScientist.com news service
- New Scientist Space and Reuters
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The Phoenix Mars lander has successfully collected water ice in one of its onboard instruments.
"We have water,"
said William Boynton, lead scientist for the mission's TEGA (Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer) instrument, which identifies the vapours produced by heating.
"We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted,"he said, referring to the craft's instruments.
NASA on Thursday also extended the mission by five weeks, saying its work was moving beyond the search for water to exploring whether the Red Planet was ever capable of sustaining life.
"We are extending the mission through September 30," Michael Meyer, chief scientist for NASA's Mars exploration programme, told a televised news conference.
The extension will add about $2 million to the $420 million cost of landing Phoenix on 25 May for what was a scheduled three-month mission, Meyer said.
Habitable conditions
Phoenix is the latest NASA bid to discover whether water – a crucial ingredient for life – ever flowed on Mars and whether life could ever have existed there.
Phoenix touched down in May on the northern plains of Mars and samples of the ice were seen vapourising away in photographs taken by the lander's instruments in June.
Boynton said that water was positively identified after the lander's robotic arm delivered a soil sample on Wednesday to the TEGA instrument. The sample, initially thought to be mostly dry, was collected to test new sample delivery techniques after previous attempts to drop icy soil into TEGA had failed due to the stickiness of the soil.
Mission scientists said the extension would give time for more analysis of Martian samples. They plan to dig two additional trenches – dubbed "cupboard" and "neverland" – using the robotic arm on the Phoenix craft.
"We hope to be able to answer the question of whether this was a habitable zone on Mars. It will be for future missions to find if anyone is home on this environment," Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith told the news conference.
Mission scientists said in June that Martian soil was more alkaline than expected and had traces of magnesium, sodium, potassium and other elements.
Meyer said
the scientific proof of the existence of water meant that Phoenix could "move from looking for water to seeing whether there were habitats for life. We are moving towards understanding whether there were or could be places on Mars that are habitable".
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