The sands of Mars

[james_davis_nicoll]

James Canvin reports on the early results from Phoenix.

Comments

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

Ice! Ice! Ice! Ice!

I mean, it could just be evaporative salts, or who knows what else... but I want it to be ice. Please be ice? Please?

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Well, it sure as heck *looks* like ice. Not just in being white, but the mix of translucencies.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

But remember that the images are a composite, and slightly tweaked, mash up of the various colour sensors the 'bot uses - that's not neccesarily an accurate representation of what the substance actually looks like, colour and translucency-wise.

There was actually a huge conspiracy theory blow up over the way the lander-before-last's images showed the little color reference thingie 's blue section as bright pink due to the way the blue paint reflected more infrared than it was meant to, which skewed the resulting image toward the red end of the spectrum on that one bit of the picture, and thus was obviously proof that it was all a hoax by NASA to fool people into not believing in martians.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Fairly safe to assume it's ice. Frost polygons and evaporites are pretty much mutually exclusive. Evaporites means no water for frost wedging, frost wedging means water isn't evaporating in the quantities needed to form evaporite pavement.

Well, I suppose there could be some kind of funky action due to the low pressure, but I'm still betting on ice.

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

What with all these lone and level sands stretching far away, I reflexively keep looking in the panoramas for that statue of Ozymandias, King of Kings.

No luck yet.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I empathise; I keep an eye out for thoat tracks in every shot too.

-- Steve'd love to help dig any canals they'd like in the region.

[j-larson.livejournal.com]

I watch for worm-sign.