With water on Mars, can life be far behind?

Several weeks ago, Phoenix uncovered convincing visual evidence that it had landed on an ice field when it set down on Mars’ northern plain May 25.

Pictures beamed back to Earth across 200 million miles showed white streaks in the lumpy soil around the lander, and a rasp tool on the lander’s robotic arm had shaved off chunks of the material that scientists were certain was ice.

But on Thursday, the Phoenix team, consisting of scientists from NASA and the University of Arizona, presented evidence that material baked in one of Phoenix’s eight tiny ovens was indeed water, the first time any spacecraft from Earth had tasted the life-giving substance on another world.

“The fact that it melted at zero degrees centigrade leaves very little doubt,” said Boynton, speaking at a news conference in Tucson, Arizona.

For Phoenix scientists, the challenge hasn’t been finding the ice, but getting it into one of the testing ovens attached to the TEGA instrument. The ovens are tiny, about the width of a pen cartridge. Getting soil in there was difficult because it proved to be clumpy and stuck together. They finally got one sample of soil in an oven several weeks ago through a process of dribbling it in.

Getting the ice in was even harder. It tended to either vapourise or stick to the scoop on the robotic arm.