Phoenix lander tastes its first ice

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 5 days (www.nature.com)

After a month of difficulty, the Mars Phoenix spacecraft is back in the baked goods business — and even got to put a little icing on top.

On Thursday, mission scientists announced they had managed to scrape some Martian soil up and sprinkle it inside one of the spacecraft’s eight ovens — where they discovered that a tiny bit of ice had tagged along with the soil. It’s the first ice actually sampled by the mission after weeks of fruitless attempts to get more pure ice in the ovens.

A panorama of the Phoenix landing site reveals its dusty environs (NASA/JPL-Caltech/U. Arizona/Texas A&M)

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Mars Phoenix lander transmits photos!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 7 months 2 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

Last night I watched the live feed of the NASA control center as the Phoenix lander touched down on Mars' polar region. Its mission is to examine water on Mars with an eye toward whether there is or ever was life on Mars. It transmitted its first photos in the wee hours of this morning.

So far it looks like cracked rock and pebbles, but the scientists are sure that they will find ice!

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Enough water to go around?

sumsung submitted, created time 9 months 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

If our planet were perfectly flat and its water covered all the surface, it would create a layer 2.7 kilometers deep. While this seems like a lot, less than 3% of that is freshwater. Of that, nearly 70% is in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow, and 30% sits in ground water. Rivers, lakes, and clouds carry less than 1% of the world's freshwater.

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Was Life Born in Ice?

Sue Wu submitted, created time 11 months 6 days (discovermagazine.com)

If life on Earth arose from ice, then our chances of finding life elsewhere in the solar system—not to mention elsewhere in the galaxy—may be better than we ever imagined.

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Diffusion-controlled metabolism for long-term survival of single isolated microorganisms trapped within ice crystals

stephen submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.pnas.org)

Two known habitats for microbial metabolism in ice are surfaces of mineral grains and liquid veins along three-grain boundaries. We propose a third, more general, habitat in which a microbe frozen in ice can metabolize by redox reactions with dissolved small molecules such as CO2, O2, N2, CO, and CH4 diffusing through the ice lattice.

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