Where a robot scraped the soil and touched Martian ice.
The Phoenix Site sits in the far northern plains of Mars, at latitude 68°N — Martian arctic terrain. Here NASA's Phoenix lander touched down in 2008 and, digging just a few centimetres into the soil, exposed and confirmed water ice for the first time by direct sampling.
Claim your plot here →Phoenix was a stationary lander with a robotic arm built to dig. When it scraped a shallow trench, it uncovered bright material that vanished over a few days — ice sublimating into the thin air, proving it was frozen water rather than salt. Its onboard oven later baked a soil sample and detected water vapour, sealing the discovery.
The lander also detected perchlorate, a reactive salt that affects how water could exist and whether life might survive. As the arctic winter closed in and sunlight faded, Phoenix's solar panels lost power in late 2008; carbon-dioxide frost eventually crushed them, ending the mission where it landed.
Like Earth's tundra, the ground here is permafrost — but the 'summer' high still sits far below freezing.
The ice lay just 5-18 cm down — shallower than a trowel's reach in a backyard.