Holy Cow and Snow Queen
It looks like there is mounting evidence that two flat, light-toned deposits beneath the Phoenix lander, known as “Holy Cow” and “Snow Queen” are pieces of ice exposed when the rockets blew away a thin coating of soil. As always, Emily has all the gory details. I don’t have much to add other than to reiterate how amazingly awesome it would be for there to be ice that close to the surface, and how much I hope the mass spectrometer works. For now, I’ll leave you with this tantalizing image of “Snow Queen”. I don’t know about you, but that looks an awful lot like ice to me…
The Martian Chronicles 
June 2, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Ah…that age-old question: Is it a rock or is it ice?
June 2, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Haha, I had forgotten about that. I guess it’s a little harder to answer on Mars than on Titan. But only a little. I suspect we’ll be hearing confirmation that it is ice pretty soon.
June 5, 2008 at 12:34 pm
[…] website). Already Phoenix is returning fantastic images, including a pic of what might very well be ice on the martian surface (Martianchronicles is a great ressource, too). Water, frozen or not, is a prerequisite for life – […]
December 24, 2009 at 12:45 am
If that’s ice, I’ll kiss a monkey’s @$$!!!! It appears to be bone and/or joint, due to the smooth openings allowing what would likely be arteries or nerves. Besides if that was ice, wouldn’t the blast have melted it beings only a few inches from the surface?
August 3, 2010 at 12:26 am
Well….., No follow-up comments to the one posted 12/24/09?