What is on Phoenix’s Leg?
I cannot stop looking at this animation. The first frame was taken on the 8th sol (a Mars day) and the second around the 31st sol. As you can see from the animation, it seems that some mystery material is either growing, moving or multiplying around one of the legs of the Phoenix lander. The most likely source is frost building up on what would be a very cold surface, however the only issue is that it doesn’t look exactly like frost and it hasn’t appeared on any of the other legs.
Image note: We added an artificial fade from 1 frame to frame 2 and scaled the original image to around 300%. Due to artifacts from increasing the scale and compression we added some noise to smooth out the overall appearance.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
There were some new underbelly shots yesterday and the stuff looks like it’s still growing.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
its bacteria. giant martian sized bacteria.
July 11th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
See, this is why a sample return mission is a bad idea: how long would it be before the stuff broke out of the lab and infected Nicole Kidman (or at least Donald Sutherland)?
July 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Sure looks like ‘frost’ to me. Besides water ice could it also be CO2 ice?
One possible reason it doesn’t appear on the other legs is because of the micro-climate conditions created by the lander itself. Maybe this leg is in continuous shadow?
July 31st, 2008 at 6:34 am
perhaps it is a salt? What is the air temprature / composition?
August 17th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Well, there was always comments about LGMs on Mars. Maybe that stands for “lumpy green mould”?
I suspect it’s a frost build-up, maybe with some dust particulates bound in with it. Especially if the scoop is spilling stuff and bits are going everywhere.