NASA spent $420 million to send the Phoenix Lander to Mars last year. Festooned with state-of-the-art detection equipment, the rover's task was to scour the red surface in search of elusive Martian ice. And today, the NASA mission finally did uncover some extraterrestrial frost, and it did it with its simplest tool, a shovel.
I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but is it possible that this "ice" is dry ice? Frozen CO2? I seem to recall reading somewhere (I think it was wikipedia's article on how to terraform mars) that there was a lot of frozen CO2 at the poles...perhaps that is what this is? Becuase that too would sublimate, just as water would, which I think was their basis for identifying this "ice" as H20. Any thoughts?
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