Which NASA lander found water ice near the Martian north pole in 2008? Phoenix did. NASA’s Phoenix lander touched down in Mars’s northern polar region on May 25, 2008, and confirmed that bright material beneath the surface was water ice.
Phoenix used its robotic arm to scrape shallow trenches in the soil. Bright deposits exposed in the trenches gradually disappeared after several Martian days, behavior consistent with ice sublimating into the atmosphere. The lander’s instruments also analyzed the soil and detected perchlorate salts and other chemical clues about Mars’s environment.
A common mix-up is confusing Phoenix with NASA’s Viking landers, which landed on Mars in 1976 and performed biology experiments, or with InSight, which studied Mars’s interior beginning in 2018. Pathfinder explored an equatorial region in 1997 and did not make this polar ice discovery. Phoenix operated through the Martian summer before communications ended in November 2008.