NASA shelves science, uses reasoning to discover ice on Mars

There are a lot of real happy scientists out there today after NASA announced they have officially discovered ice on Mars with their Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft. The whole purpose of the Phoenix mission was to find ice, and hopefully organic life in the ice, which NASA is one step closer to today. So just exactly how do you determine if you've discovered ice on another planet? Forget fancy experiments and tests. All you have to do is take a picture of the ground one day, then do it again four days later, and see if anything has changed. That's what NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) did when examining the silvery looking substance in the bottom of the trench dug by Phoenix's robotic arm as seen in the picture. They show more of the substance on the left photo than in the right which was taken four days later from the same trench, referred to informally as "Dodo-Goldilocks". NASA scientists believe the substance is ice that has vaporized through the process of sublimation because the stuff obviously didn't get up and walk away on its own. Cheers to you, NASA! I hope you have the same luck finding organic life on Mars , unless they turn out to be evil Martian aliens.

Photo: NASA

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