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" UPDATE (2:56 p.m.): &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re going to be some pretty busy boys and girls for the next couple months,&amp;quot; Boynton says. And why not? Extending the Phoenix Mission through Sept. 30 costs $2 million. UPDATE (2:50 p.m.): The Phoenix mission will be extended, but team leaders aren&amp;#039;t sure how long the lander will last, so they&amp;#039;re gathering as much information and evidence on Mars as possible. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re learning as we go along the best way to heat the soil ... and we have ways of fine tuning the instrument to look for organic molecules at the expense of other molecules,&amp;quot; Boynton says. &amp;quot;It will be very helpful to have more time ... to use all of TEGA&amp;#039;s 8 ovens [to heat samples for measurement in a spectrometer].&amp;quot;   So the hunt for organics on Mars has officially begun. UPDATE (2:44 p.m.): In the future they will &amp;quot;probably get more samples that are more ice rich,&amp;quot; Boynton says. He added that researchers did not expect to find ice in the samples, but that traces of H20 chips were present. UPDATE (2:41 p.m.): Mars Odyssey saw shallow troughs that indicated ice could be under the soil, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter helped guide where the lander would set down\u2014an area near the troughs that had few rocks. The new analysis proves that ice indeed influences this area of the Martian pole. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s an ice-dominated terrain,&amp;quot; says Mark Lemmon, lead scientist for Phoenix Surface Stereo Imager at Texas A&amp;amp;amp;M University.  The Phoenix mission has been extended, and the next step will be digging two new trenches between the troughs to get samples from other soil formations. UPDATE (2:26 p.m.): &amp;quot;It has tasted success,&amp;quot; says Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters. UPDATE (2:22 p.m.): Phoenix researchers are using the lander&amp;#039;s laser radar (LIDAR) to study the atmosphere, said Victoria Hipkin, mission scientist for the Phoenix Meteorological Station at the Canadian Space Agency. The LIDAR beam shoots up and can analyze wind direction at different heights. The power supply is high enough to send the beam higher than expected. UPDATE (2:18 p.m.): &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve now finally touched and tasted it,&amp;quot; the oven instrument&amp;#039;s lead scientist William Boynton, of the University of Arizona said. &amp;quot;From my standpoint it tastes very fine.&amp;quot; UPDATE (2:16 p.m.): Researchers described champagne corks popping in the downlink room yesterday as the data indicated that the sample was water ice. UPDATE (2:13 p.m., July 31): As PopularMechanics.com first reported here, scientists from NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and Texas A&amp;amp;amp;M have just officially announced at a press conference that soil samples taken by Phoenix on Mars are water ice.  &amp;quot;We expected to find water\u2014that&amp;#039;s why we came here, but we&amp;#039;re very pleased to see we landed right on top of water ice,&amp;quot; says Peter Smith, the principal investigator for Phoenix at the University of Arizona.  The hard, solid substance discovered 2 in. under the soil beneath the lander is &amp;quot;definitely&amp;quot; a solid layer of water ice.  Two new trenches will be carved and explored for different kinds of ice. &amp;quot;We also hope to answer the question ... if this is a habitable zone on Mars,&amp;quot; Smith said, adding that he hopes to guide future missions to search for life where the Phoenix lander is located. In a discovery that could qualify as one of the most important in the history of space exploration, NASA&amp;#039;s Phoenix Mission may have confirmed the presence of water ice on the planet, Popular Mechanics has learned. The scheduling of a press conference for Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time by NASA and the University of Arizona has raised hopes in the space community that scientists will announce the breakthrough. When pressed for details, a spokesperson for the agency&amp;#039;s Jet Propulsion Laboratory refused to elaborate beyond saying that the Phoenix team would unveil new findings from the ongoing robotic mission to Mars. If the rumor holds true, it would be the first direct confirmation of water ice beyond Earth. Data from recent missions to Mars has been building toward a confirmation of the presence of water ice. However, &amp;quot;this would be the first time we held it in our hands, so to speak,&amp;quot; says Bryan DeBates, a senior aerospace education specialist at the Space Foundation. Evidence from other locations in the solar system, including Earth&amp;#039;s moon, Saturn&amp;#039;s Enceladus moon and Jupiter&amp;#039;s Europa moon, have strongly hinted at the presence of water\u2014NASA confirmed a liquid lake on Saturn&amp;#039;s Titan moon on Wednesday\u2014but no direct observation of water has been made.   If the presence of water is confirmed on a small patch near the lander, the volume of ice on the Martian surface could be &amp;quot;extraordinary,&amp;quot; says Mary Bourke, a planetary research scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Ariz. The landing site was chosen because the porosity of the soil appeared to lend itself to a build up of water ice\u2014and that type of soil is widespread on Mars. The presence of widespread water would make any mission to establish a manned Martian base far more feasible. (Of course, the presence of water would also greatly increase the likelihood that life exists, or once did exist, on the planet.) Staff operating the Phoenix Lander from mission control in Arizona have been closely watching a patch of what they believed to be ice that was uncovered as the lander descended. The Phoenix Mars Lander has been scraping samples and dropping them into a spectrometer that heats the samples to determine their chemical composition. On Sunday, the Phoenix team changed the way it dug to reduce friction that prematurely heated the samples. On Tuesday, NASA scientists stated that the surface of the patch, dubbed &amp;quot;Snow Queen,&amp;quot; has changed between June and July. A camera mounted on a robotic arm captured those changes, which include 4-in. cracks and a visibly rougher surface texture.   Sources within NASA&amp;#039;s Jet Propulsion Laboratory hinted that the new findings could reveal details of the atmosphere as well as the ground\u2014perhaps indicating that researchers have learned new lessons about the dynamics of the Martian environment by the way the exposed material reacts to the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. The fractures could have appeared as ice sublimated off the surface. It&amp;#039;s also possible that temperature changes made the surface crack. However, any findings about the atmosphere could have come independently of observations of the ice surface, since there are atmospheric instruments such as laser radar on Phoenix, so any atmospheric findings could be separate from the water ice issue. For some Mars researchers, that would be fine. &amp;quot;Research into Mars&amp;#039; atmosphere really needs to be beefed up,&amp;quot; Bourke says. &amp;quot;Any information about it could be invaluable.&amp;quot;  Also, two European orbiters circling Mars have recently captured geological features that indicate the planet once had standing water for thousands of years, including river valleys and 13,000-ft. waterfalls. The next step after confirming the presence of ice would be finding out if life ever existed\u2014or still does, in some deep Martian aquifer. &amp;quot;NASA&amp;#039;s mantra has been `Follow the ice to find life,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says DeBates. And if life does not exist there, earthlings may import some. &amp;quot;Establishing a Mars colony is going to be a lot easier to maintain, having water there,&amp;quot; DeBates says. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a3500/4275801/>