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Happy birthday Phoenix!

The Phoenix Mars Lander carrying the Canadian meteorological station (also known as MET) and the lidar instrument landed in the Martian North Pole on May 25, 2008, after a journey almost ten-month long. The first mission ever to land in the Martian Arctic region revealed the presence of water ice on the Red Planet and also provided scientists with a complete set of meteorological data. One year later, atmospheric scientists are still analyzing all the data beamed back by Phoenix. We caught up with Dr. Vicky Hipkin, MET mission scientist for the Canadian Space Agency, who is now working with her colleagues on the Canadian science team using MET data to improve atmospheric models of the Mars water cycle.

Dr. Hipkin, what were you expecting to discover with the MET station and the lidar aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander?

We were mostly interested in pressure and temperature measurements, which would indicate seasonal trends. So far, there had been very few meteorological measurements made on Mars. Phoenix was only the fourth Martian weather station, and it was the first one in the Arctic. We were looking for anything new and some confirmation of phenomena we had noticed before like the formation of clouds.

What did the Canadian meteorological station teach us?

The detection of snow is the MET's major discovery. Thanks to the Canadian lidar instrument, we were able to observe snowfall above Phoenix's landing site. We also discovered that Martian clouds do form much closer to the ground than we expected. The lidar also gave wonderful data about the height and the thickness of these low clouds.

Do scientists have a better understanding of the weather on Mars following the Phoenix mission?

We are still investigating the seasonal changes, and we have got a lot of new experiments to look at in our data interpretation. Given this new information and these new discoveries, we are now working on new models of Mars' atmosphere. We are testing these models and making sure that they correspond with the newly acquired data. We can then look at the impact of these results on our past climate predictions. In fact, the data gathered on the formation of clouds does affect our models in regards to the distribution of water on Mars. It is still very early to talk about any results. We are currently working on an article that will be published in a scientific journal this summer.

What can we look forward to in terms on Martian exploration?

The more we discover, the more interesting Mars becomes! We've been exploring Mars with the goals of understanding its climate and searching for life. We have made encouraging discoveries that hint at the possibility of Mars being able to support microbial life. The kinds of things we're seeing with the discovery of methane, habitable properties of the soil and the finding of new ice reservoirs towards the middle latitudes can only help making it a friendlier environment for biology. Upcoming missions will most certainly build up on Phoenix's discoveries. We're advancing the story, but it just makes Mars more interesting!

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