Anyway, @GUESSN the guy who says he can bottle glacial water from the mountains and sell it for twice the cost of gasoline: Where on EARTH do you reside? See, the rest of the human race is having an energy crisis and gasoline/oil prices are hitting record highs with no end in site. I can buy a gallon of bottled spring water for ~$.99, that same $.99 buys me about 1/5th of a gallon of gas.

Atmospheric conditions at Phoenix's location are not hospitable for typical melted ice you'd expect to see on Earth.

Temperature aside, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is a fraction of what forum readers are sitting in. Liquid water would quickly turn to a gas at Phoenix's location – similiar to a naked astronaut's blood if he/she forgot to get dressed before going for a stroll on the moon.

The Mars polar region cycles thru periods of freezing/thawing. Being in Canada and trying to dig a new pond in March, I've uncovered solid ice under dirt in the garden. The freeze/thaw of ice is similar to glaciers in mountains – dust and debris will get push aside, resulting in clear ice that can be melted, bottled and sold for twice the cost of gasoline!

We (the masses) have no way to confirm that there is any lander on Mars, let alone confirm what it finds- so have faith in NASA! Believe the unknowable, unprovable truths that men of letters hand down from the mount of big science, and keep your questioning mouth's shut!

(I don't think Dubya is evil, and EVERYONE is a hypocrite to some degree)

While the rock pattern does change between the light and dark areas, the "corrosion" looks amazingly like the other mars rocks. I'm not suggesting the photo is fake, or it's not on mars, or anything crazy, I just want to know what it is.

A few people suggested:

1. reflection of the rocks off the lander onto the leg.

hard to believe that much reflection happens in a shaded area with not much loss of quality or distortion you'd expect on a curved surface.

2. dust on the leg

there's a lot more dust on that one leg than the other legs, and this does not explain the "rocks" that appear "on" the leg.

3. dust on the leg with drops of water causing the rock-like look.

if there was water vaporized opun landing, I do not think it would condense into drops large enough to show the "washed off" rock-like spots we see.

And for your corrosion idea, it seems most plausible. If one of the rockets aimed at the leg, it could cause it to look like that, and would be different than the others. This would hint at an error in the self-destructive design of the lander.

I am a skeptic, but not an anti-nasa conspiracy theorist. (others yes, nasa no). Bush is evil, christians are hypocrites, I do enjoy the discoveries nasa makes, but that is not relevant to the story.

To the conspiracy nut skeptics:
The "ice" may be ice – melted and refrozen by the lander's rocket — or it may be a smooth patch of rock exposed by the same. Who knows, but we will find out eventually. Its guys like you who question it that have made NASA into some evil money wasting fascist dictatorship instead of the visionary pioneer dreamers we once saw them as. Its the same attitude that calls Bush Evil and all Christians hypocrites. Lets all shut up and watch the cool stuff guys! Its the 21st century!

I have showed the photo to a few friends but it has stirred up more controversy, not because the "ice", but because the transparent leg on the lander.

While editing the photo, I originally assumed that leg at the top left of the picture was part of the lander. When I started adding color and contrast, It appeared to be more of a shadow. You can clearly see the ground "through" the leg.

Judging from the angle of the other legs' shadows, that shadow must be off in the distance. Take another look and judge for yourself.

Perhaps? Or has that been ruled out?

On another note, if someone looks closely at the image inset with the above article, you'll see that there are actually beads of water on the leg of the lander to the very left in that pic. Melted ice splashing underneath as Phoenix was landing. I just noticed that as I was typing this.

this is correct. I will say though that I've rebalanced some of the color Mars photos, and you do get a less pink shy, and browner soil that way. It's still very red, but with more details, and in cases where these no dust in the sky, a pale blue color. You can clearly see that the histogram is off from channel to channel. Once you get them more lined up the color pops. The quickest way is to look for a metal part on the lander and make that neutral gray.

I do color corrections in Photoshop for a living. I don't think Nasa is doing anything underhanded, but they do make the photos more red. It's real hard to balance color sometimes, and the method that they use to render the color doesn't always help.

Common sense aint so common… OMG COnspiracy!

The way that the grayscale -> color conversion works, is, you take a picture in grayscale with a blue, green, and red filter. So you get 3 grayscale images. But then you layer them over eachother, specifying which is RGB, then you get the full color image. Google for "channels in photoshop", that should give you enough to start with.

Government agencies put national security above open science and the truth. To believe otherwise is to be a sheep.

I'm American and I won't believe it until they find guns.

The robotic arm camera gets color data in a different way than most spacecraft cameras do. Most space cameras get color images by placing filters across their optical paths that block out all but a small range of wavelengths. Take three such images with different filters and you can create a color image. The robotic arm camera has no filters. Instead, it has three sets of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), in red, green, and blue. To get information in red wavelengths, they illuminate their target with red light and take the picture. This works much better in dark, shadowed areas like the inside of a trench than it does in brightly illuminated regions;

So no filters for this one, but the principle is pretty much the same (although I fail to see how this works for panoramic views).

I also wrote something that isn't entirely true in my last comment: not all space cameras are black and white. Most are, but not all. New Horizons has a highres grayscale camera for details and a lowres colour camera for colour. I guess it will speed by its targets too quickly to allow for the taking of the typical three (or more) consecutive pictures that are used to compose a colour photo. Low illumination and the consequent need for longer exposures may also be a factor.

I think NASA may have jumped the gun massively here. Presumably that dusty patch in the foreground was also exposed by the retro rockets in exactly the same way, but it doesn't look at all like ice.

Not that I'm saying there isn't ice there somewhere, but I don't think there's any in this photograph.