Phoenix Mars Lander Scoops First Soil Sample for Analysis

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This image was taken by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Surface Stereo Imager on Sol 11 (Thursday), the 11th day after landing. It shows the robotic arm scoop containing a soil sample poised over the partially open door of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer's No. 4 cell, or oven. Light-colored clods of material visible toward the scoop's lower edge may be part of the crusted surface material seen previously near the foot of the lander. The material inside the scoop has been slightly brightened in this image. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University)

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(Click to enlarge) The Phoenix Lander's Surface Stereo Imager took this image on Sol 11 (Thursday), the 11th day after landing. It shows the trenches dug by Phoenix's robotic arm. The trench on the left is informally called "Dodo" and was dug as a test. The trench on the right is informally called "Baby Bear." The sample dug from Baby Bear will be delivered to the Phoenix's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. The Baby Bear trench is 9 centimeters (3.1 inches) wide and 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) deep. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University)

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(Click to enlarge) NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander scooped up this Martian soil on the mission's 11th Martian day, or sol, after landing as the first soil sample for delivery to the laboratory on the lander deck. The material includes a light-toned clod possibly from the crusted surface of the ground, similar in appearance to clods observed near one of the lander's feet. This approximately true-color view of the contents of the scoop on the robotic arm comes from combining separate images taken by the Robotic Arm Camera on Sol 11, using illumination by red, green and blue light-emitting diodes on the camera. The scoop loaded with this sample was poised over an open sample-delivery door of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer at the end of Sol 11, ready to be dumped into the instrument on the next sol. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute)

Phoenix's instruments are checked out and ready for science.

By University Communications June 6, 2008

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander made its first dig into Martian soil for science studies and is poised to deliver the scoopful to a laboratory instrument on the lander deck.

The instrument will bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such as water.

Commands were received by Phoenix on Friday for the spacecraft's robotic arm to dump the sample into an opened door on the instrument called the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA.

"It's looks like a good sample for us," said Peter Smith of The University of Arizona, Phoenix principal investigator. "Over the next few days, and it may be as much as a week, the TEGA instrument will be analyzing this sample."

Phoenix's robotic arm collected the sample of clumpy, reddish material from the top 2 to 4 centimeters (0.8 to 1.6 inches) of surface material at a site informally named "Baby Bear" on the north side of the lander. In the past week, engineers had used the arm to collect two practice scoops adjacent to Baby Bear and dump those scoopfuls back onto the surface. They have prepared for years with simulations and versions of the arm on Earth.

"It's like being on a football team and having a preseason that lasted five years, and now we're finally playing our first game," said Matt Robinson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located in Pasadena, Calif. He is the robotic arm flight software lead for the Phoenix team.

The move was calculated so that the instrument would not be inundated with unnecessary extra soil. "We're ecstatic that we got a quarter to a third of a scoopful," Robinson said.

The TEGA instrument will begin analyzing the sample for water and mineral content after it has analyzed a sample of the Martian atmosphere. Water can be bound to minerals, such as clays or carbonates, and it takes more heat to drive the water off some minerals than others. This is how the instrument can identify some minerals in the soil.

"We are particularly interested in minerals that are formed or altered by the action of liquid water in the soil," Smith said.

The Phoenix mission is led by Smith with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, located in 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.

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