Phoenix-sonden och vatten på Mars

In a breakthrough that likely provides scientists with their best opportunity ever to investigate extraterrestrial life, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has apparently spotted liquid ice on Mars. If the robotic spacecraft can now reach out and grab the vaporized frozen water it first photographed five days ago, it will be "mission accomplished" for arguably the space agency's most important interplanetary research venture in a decade.

"These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice," said Peter Smith, principal investigator for the Phoenix mission, which earlier this week had sparked a hot debate among researchers as to whether it had found ice—or scooped up disappearing chunks of a "sublimated" material that might have just been salt.

This is exactly what the Phoenix mission was meant to find. After snapping its first photographs of the fourth rock from the Sun in digging to the soil of Mars' arctic north, the spacecraft's robotic arm first found inconclusive evidence of a white material. But evidence analyzed on Thursday revealed that crumbs of it had gone missing in an indication that water ice had vaporized—not just melted.

So what's next for the little robot that can? Storing this newest data on a super hard drive, then downloading the ultimate Red Planet science experiment instead of depending on the device's internal flash memory.

"We now understand what happened, and we can fix it with a software patch," said Barry Goldstein, another Phoenix manager at NASA's Jett Propulsion Laboratory. "The mission is well ahead of schedule. We are making excellent progress toward full mission success."

Stay tuned to PopularMechanics.com for the latest on what ice on Mars actually means for the future of space exploration and research, and whether the downlink leads to even further conclusive evidence. ...