[X] My Assistant

[Guest_jumpjack_*]

What about collecting into a single thread all cool animated GIFs about Phoenix activities?
A possible list of cool images is:
- soil digging
- ice scraping
- TEGA filling
- ice melting
- dust devils
- sunset/sunrise
- snowing

Thanks for your contribution!

Direct links to images, or even attachments, would be better than just links to pages which link to images.

Standalone page with inline animations:
http://www.planetmobile.it/jumpjack/immagi...ni-phoenix.html

[dvandorn]

What amazes me is not that we're seeing dust devils -- as Doug said, it's all a matter of relative temps, as long as the differential is of the right magnitude, it doesn't really matter what the overall temperature state is.

No, what amazes me is that there doesn't seem to be any albedo impact from these DDs. In other regions, DD tracks are quite obvious and even prominent. Here, there was no trace of such DD "leavings" in any of the HiRISE images of the area.

It's not because the soil is of uniform albedo -- we can see very clearly that the soil disturbed by Phoenix's landing thrusters is much darker than the undisturbed soil. Also, soil disturbed by impact from the heatshield and backshell shows a distinct darkening.

Why, then, if DDs roam these plains, are there no DD tracks?

That's the really fascinating question here, to me.

-the other Doug