Ice

White material exposed by digging into the surface of Mars appears to be sublimating into the atmosphere, convincing scientists that it's ice. Some dice-sized chunks of white material uncovered by the Phoenix Mars Lander has disappeared over four days after it was first exposed.

"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that."

This discovery came a day after the flash memory aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander was overwhelmed by duplicative file-maintenance data causing it to lose a day's worth of scientific findings. NASA will run a software patch to bypass the Phoenix's flash memory until the problem can be corrected.

The "Dodo-Goldilocks" trench shows white material that scientists believe is ice.

June 20, 2008 6:15 AM PDT

Photo by: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University