HOUSTON, May 31 (UPI) -- U.S. space officials said exhaust from NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has exposed either rock or ice beneath the Mars lander.
"We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be seeing exposed ice in the retrorocket blast zone," Ray Arvidson of Washington University said in a statement. "We'll test the two ideas by getting more data, including color data, from the robotic arm camera. We think that if the hard features are ice, they will become brighter because atmospheric water vapor will collect as new frost on the ice."