Phoenix Legacy – Data on Martian Water Cycles

Now that the Phoenix Mars Lander is defunct and the mission is officially over beyond all hope, scientists have been able to focus on the data that the device has collected and relayed to us. The main source of interest is represented by the water found in the region of the landing site, but a series of examinations could not eventually lead to any firm conclusion referring to the possibility that life ever existed there.

The scientists did find that the previous computer models of the Martian weather and water cycles were wrong, and during the opening day of the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, the Phoenix experts shared that new models based on the fresh data could provide better knowledge of the red planet's past. Besides searching for clues on organic life in water ice and soil samples, the team also obtained accurate daily weather reports from the site.

 

"It's a very active weather environment," stated lead investigator Peter Smith, as cited by Reuters. Summer’s dusty atmosphere slowly morphs into a clouded sky, with frost and snow taking over as fall installs. Current models should also take into account the fact that Mars has no stabilizing Moon, thus its axial tilt changes by a large amount, shifting the polar regions by more than 35 degrees over thousands of years and exposing them to warmer temperatures.

 

Perhaps this also meant that the polar areas were more wet. The cloddish texture of the soil suggests a cementing effect influenced by water, "It's not strongly cemented. It would break up in your hand, but the cloddiness tells us that something is taking the windblown material and mildly cementing it," explained Ray Arvidson, from the Washington University in St. Louis, the lead scientist for Phoenix's robotic arm.

 

"There's exchange between the atmosphere and the subsurface ice," also shared Aaron Zent of NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, quoted by PhysOrg. "A film of water molecules accumulates on the surfaces of mineral particles. It's not enough right now to transform the chemistry, but the measurements are providing verification that these molecular films are occurring when you would expect them to, and this gives us more confidence in predicting the way they would behave in other parts of the obliquity cycles."