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NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Delivers Soil Sample to Microscope
GDO Report
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander sprinkled a spoonful of Martian soil Wednesday onto the sample wheel of the spacecraft's robotic microscope station, images received early Thursday confirmed. "It looks like a light dusting and that's just what we wanted. The Robotic Arm team did a great job," said Michael Hecht of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. He is the lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA) instrument on Phoenix. The delivery of scooped-up soil for inspection by the lander's Optical Microscope, a component of MECA, marks the second success in consecutive days for getting samples delivered to laboratory instruments on Phoenix's deck. Some soil from an earlier scoopful reached a tiny oven in another instrument on Tuesday, as confirmed in data received early Wednesday. That instrument is the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. Commands being sent to Phoenix today include instructions to close TEGA oven number 4 and begin analyzing the sample inside, a process that will take several days.
The soil now in the microscope station came from the same scoopful that was used for a practice run of the sprinkle delivery technique on Monday. That scoopful has the informal name "Mama Bear." The sample delivered to TEGA oven 4 has the informal name "Baby Bear." Both came from a trench now called "Goldilocks" but earlier referred to as Baby Bear, on the northwest side of the lander. The Phoenix team assembled at the University of Arizona plans to command the Robotic Arm in the next day or two to dig deeper into the Goldilocks trench and an adjacent trench called "Dodo" to determine the depth to an underlying layer of hard material that may be ice. The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. For more about Phoenix, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu. NASA's Mars Phoenix lander is really cooking now MARS - After numerous failures, scientists are able to shake a sample of Martian soil into an oven on the lander, setting the stage for long-awaited tests. A last-ditch attempt to shake a sample of Martian soil into an oven on NASA's Phoenix lander succeeded Wednesday, clearing the way for tests to determine whether the northern plains of Mars may once have been habitable. "The group went up in cheers -- I got a standing ovation," said William Boynton, the lead scientist on the vital instrument that will bake the Martian sample in a search for organic compounds. After six failures, the team at the University of Arizona and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Caņada Flintridge made one last effort, Boynton said. When the shaking terminated abruptly, the team thought the machine had failed. Then they discovered it had stopped because the oven was full. As the scientists in Tucson cheered the result, Boynton put on the old disco tune "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" and started swaying to the music. The histrionics among normally even-tempered scientists results from the fact that a failure with the TEGA could have doomed the $420-million mission. Although NASA has been sending spacecraft to other worlds for more than three decades, Phoenix is the first to search for water, the foundation of life as we know it. The craft landed on Mars on May 25 after a 296-day journey. NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has detected large stores of ice at the poles, and Phoenix scientists think ice is only inches beneath the lander. If the shaking method had failed to send the soil cascading into the oven, scientists were planning to scoop up a new batch of soil and trickle it into the chute instead of dumping it in a big clump. Peter Smith, the lead team member from the University of Arizona, said the scientists would use the trickle method for future deliveries to the other ovens. Over a period of weeks, the ovens will heat up soil and ice samples and analyze the gases given off. Because different elements are emitted at different temperatures, the ovens will gradually increase the cooking temperature to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Analysis of the soil sample will not begin for a few days. Instead, the first results will come from a second instrument, the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer. The first microscope images of the soil could arrive today. Scientists hope the pictures will help them figure out why the soil is different than what they expected. It appears to have a crusty layer on top and contains some ingredient, possibly water or salt, that causes it to form clods, Smith said. "I'm quite excited" by the unusual nature of the soil, he said. The latest pictures, sent Tuesday, show two new trenches, dubbed Dodo and Baby Bear, dug by the scoop attached to the robotic arm. At the bottom of the trenches are whitish streaks that could indicate Phoenix has already reached the ice layer. Some scientists are still doubters, however, and the difference of opinion has inspired some fevered debate. Smith compared one argument Tuesday night to a baseball manager thrusting out his jaw while disputing an umpire's call. "There was a little bit of a heated discussion," he said.
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