Artist concept of the Phoenix lander,
sleeping under the darkening polar skies of Martian autumn.It seems like only last month that we witnessed the drama of NASA's Phoenix landing on Mars. We were on the edge of our seats in Chabot's planetarium during those "seven minutes of terror" as Phoenix burned a meteoric path through Mars' atmosphere.

But that was last May, and Phoenix has operated near Mars' northern polar ice cap going on six months now! The mission has continued a couple months longer than originally planned, giving Phoenix more time to dig in the icy soil, bake scooped up samples to detect what chemicals sublimate, track the polar weather day and night, and look to the skies with its various instruments.

Phoenix sent back some very interesting news. Indeed, it had landed on what turned out to be dust-coated water ice; ice that contains chemicals like calcite and perchlorate– the former of which may indicate past liquid water on Mars, the latter of which, however, is generally toxic, and may complicate arguments for life, past or present, on Mars.

One of the more "fanciful" detections by Phoenix was falling snow: two or three miles above, Phoenix detected ice crystals falling from clouds– albeit flakes that never made it to the ground, instead evaporating like Earthly virga back into the atmosphere.

But Phoenix’s mission has a built-in conclusion (unlike the seemingly perpetual Energizer Bunnies exploring the Martian tropics, aka the Mars Exploration Rovers). Phoenix landed at 68 degrees north latitude– that’s equivalent on Earth to the north coast of Alaska, Norway, or south central Greenland– prior to Martian northern summer solstice (which was June 25). As with Earthly summertime, the polar days were unending, the Sun above the horizon 24 hours a day (yes, Mars' day is about 24 hours long, just as on Earth). This provided Phoenix with its electrical power, generated by photovoltaic panels.

But now the Sun is dipping below the horizon several hours a day as the Martian northern hemisphere slides in the direction of autumnal equinox (December 26, 2008), at which time the Sun will spend half the time below the horizon, the other half never rising very high. Already, Phoenix's solar panels are generating considerably less power than in the heyday of its mission. A dust storm, filling the air and blocking some of the already weak sunlight, has also cut available power to the lander for a time in October.

The diminishing conditions also caused Phoenix to put itself into an automatic "sleep" mode in late October, waking up for only a short time each day, when solar energy was at a peak. To give a flavor of the temperatures Phoenix is enduring, on Sol 151 (the 151^st Martian day since landing-October 27^th, Earth time), the daily high reached a balmy 50.8 degrees F-negative 50.8 that is! The night time low hit -128 degrees F… .

With every day possibly being the last we hear from Phoenix, scientists are collecting as much data as possible, mostly focusing on meteorological conditions. Reporting from the Martian polar ice cap, as the icy darkness of winter begins to settle in, this is Phoenix Lander, signing off….

For this past patriotic weekend, I was on the other side of the coast. Namely, driving from Washington DC into the rural wilderness of Virginia for a get away. It was not the man-made fireworks that grabbed my attention but the activity of thunderclouds.

I was reading out loud as we drove down I-64 towards an ever darkening sky. My friend, Brad shushed me at one point to concentrate on driving. I looked up to see why and was stunned. A sheet of water and staccato pulses of hail and lightning were all I could see. It reminded me of the intensity of being caught in blizzard conditions while driving toward Tahoe in Northern California. But here we were, in Virginia on a very warm and balmy day and the sky had literally opened up with water. What's more, hail was falling. I turned to Brad and asked how could hail exist in such warm conditions? He was stumped and I was fascinated.

With a little detective work, I came up with an answer to the dilemma. Hail is only produced in cumulonimbi clouds (thunderclouds). They usually only occur at the front of a storm system which was what we experienced. The hail hit in the first ten minutes and then was followed by heavy rain. However, the rain was warm to the touch unlike the frozen water making up the hailstones.

The fire in the nearby Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and incredibly hot and humid conditions in Virginia created ideal conditions for hail. Hail is created inside a thunderstorm that has strong updrafts of warm air and downdrafts of cold air. A water droplet with an apex point is picked up by the updrafts and travels into the cooler air and freezes. The apex point known as the condensation nuclei in the water droplet was probably dust from the fire or nearby salt water during this particular hailstorm. (Both Brad and I experienced dry and stinging eyes after going into one of the storms later that weekend, much like the stinging of salt water.) Layers of ice are then accumulated around this nuclei as the droplet goes through a cycle of being caught in an updraft and then carried beyond the freezing level of the atmosphere and then thawing partially in entering the warmer air on a downdraft. This cycle repeats itself creating increasing layers of ice. Then as some point this frozen water droplet with several irregular layers falls to the ground as hail.

Some of the largest hailstones have been recorded during summer storms in humid climates because the warm updrafts and cold downdrafts along with high surface heat create an optimal cycle for large hail. Smaller hailstones can be coupled more easily with larger hailstones in these conditions.

Video of Large Hailstones

Over the course of the weekend, we had three more thunderstorms (one of which broke a car back window nearby) and we kept an eye on a thundercloud that looked like it wanted to become a tornado. I came home very thankful for the fog! NOAA the National and Atmospheric Administration has a National Weather Service. At http://www.weather.gov/ anyone can check weather reports in any given area. To issue proper warnings and forecasts regarding hail, the National Weather Service uses a network of NEXRAD doppler radars to detect it. Hail size and probability can be determined from radar data by a computer by different algorithms and compared to the local atmospheric data to determine the threat level.

It seems the storms have not cleared yet throughout the area in Virginia we visited– severe thunderstorm warnings are still posted on NOAA. So the fireworks might have passed but thunderclouds are still lighting up the sky.

A patch of what might be ice, exposed by Phoenix's
landing rockets.So, did it land on ice? Huh? Did it?

Two blogs ago I wrote about the then upcoming landing of the Phoenix spacecraft on Mars, near the Northern polar ice cap (Probing the Martian Pole). The entire point of landing on Mars' extreme northern plains was to find and examine ice-ice we know is up there in great abundance, as detected by orbiting spacecraft (Mars Odyssey 2001).

There, frozen under the surface dust layers, is a vast deposit of ice-"enough to fill Lake Michigan twice." So Phoenix was sent to actually land there and scrape up surface samples of the soil, and hopefully ice. The question was, would the layer of dust covering the ice be thin enough for Phoenix to reach the ice with its robotic arm and shovel?

The landing occurred on May 25th-a successful landing. NASA broadcast the drama live on NASA TV, which we shared with several hundred Chabot visitors via planetarium, theater, and closed-circuit TV. There were no actual images coming from Phoenix during the landing-after all, it was cooped up in its protective shell for much of the descent-but the excitement of the real-time drama and the nervous faces of NASA/JPL were enough to enthrall our audience. Pictures wouldn't come form Phoenix until later that night at the earliest.

But the pictures did come in over the days following. At first they looked much like images from other Mars landers (Viking, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity), only flatter. Rusty red soil, low flat horizon, a scattering of pebbles and rocks. The landscape itself appeared less interesting to me than other landing sites-but if you measure Phoenix's success by the beauty of the scenery, you're missing the point.

Phoenix is pretty much all about the ice, and what chemicals are frozen and preserved in it. The questions asked by the Phoenix mission are: did life ever arise on Mars, is the current climate on Mars suitable to support life, and what is Mars' geological makeup? If the vast ice deposits of the flat northern hemisphere lowlands are the frozen leftovers of what was once a liquid sea, then are there chemical clues of past conditions-even past life-locked up and preserved there?

So, do we have answers to these questions yet? Is there ice under Phoenix within reach of its scooper? At the time of my writing this the answer is: maybe. During the first week of testing Phoenix's systems to get it ready for full-on prospecting, a picture of the ground underneath the lander was taken using the camera attached to the robotic arm. This picture revealed a patch of solid substance that seems to have been exposed by the blast of Phoenix's landing rockets. It looks like it could be ice, but until a sample is analyzed we won't know for sure (because, it could be solid rock, too).

The first sample scoop of soil dug up by Phoenix's shovel was placed in a bucket on board the lander and examined by camera, before being carefully dumped into a designated sample waste location (Mars' first land fill). The picture revealed some white substance in the reddish soil-which could be ice, or possible salt.…

Stay tuned in the coming days and weeks for hot news from the ice as Phoenix conducts its investigations in earnest.