NASA's Phoenix Mars lander returned more detailed images from the Red Planet and was using some of its instruments, including a robotic arm and a Canadian laser, for scientific tasks. An image captured by the robotic-arm camera from underneath the lander may be of ice that was exposed when soil was blown away during the spacecraft's landing last Sunday, NASA scientists said in a release Friday. "We could very well be seeing rock, or we could be seeing exposed ice in the retrorocket blast zone," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who is the robotic arm's co-investigator. "We'll test the two ideas by getting more data, including colour data, from the robotic-arm camera." If the hard features are indeed ice, they will become brighter because atmospheric water vapour will collect as new frost on the ice, he said. "Full confirmation of what we're seeing will come when we excavate and analyze layers in the nearby...