Phoenix mars lander
By jwfarrimond
@jwfarrimond (4473)
May 26, 2008 2:35am CST
The Phoenix Mars lander has successfully landed on Mars's polar region. The landers mission, though said "to be look for traces of life" by the popular media, is in fact intended to look for water which is hoped will be present in the form of subsurface ice. Looking at some of the preliminary photos my initial reaction was: "That's Ice wedging."
Ice wedging is a characteristic of permafrost regions here on earth. Water freezing in the ground forms characteristic polygonal features, and such features are clearly visible in some of the photos already returned from Phoenix.
I will be very interested in the ongoing results form this mission and in particular I'll be interested to see if the scientists agree with my initial interpretation of the photos.
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