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RE: The Phoenix lander

Blobrana · L

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Credit NASA

Image taken by the Phoenix lander on Sol 16 (June 11, 2008)

Blobrana · L

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has filled its first oven with Martian soil.

"We have an oven full. It took 10 seconds to fill the oven. The ground moved" - Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyser instrument, or TEGA, for Phoenix. The instrument has eight separate tiny ovens to bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such as water.

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Blobrana · L

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This image, taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on the 14th Martian day of the mission (June 7, 2008), shows the cable that held the Robotic Arm's biobarrier in place during flight has snapped. The cable's springs retracted to release the biobarrier right after landing.
To the lower right of the image a spring is visible. Extending from that spring is a length of cable that snapped during the biobarrier's release. A second spring separated from the cable when it snapped and has been photographed on the ground under the lander near one of the legs.

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On Sunday, Sol 14 of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission, mechanical shakers inside the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyser will attempt to loosen clumped soils on the device's screens to allow material to fall into the oven for analysis later in the week.
The commands for this shaking action were to be sent to the spacecraft late morning Sunday, Pacific Daylight Time, and results will be reported Monday, June 9. Also on Sol 14, the robotic arm will acquire a sample from the "Baby Bear" site intended for the MECA microscopy station. Delivery of that sample will occur no earlier than Sol 16, after testing is done to sprinkle the sample.

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Blobrana · L

On Sunday, Sol 14 of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission, mechanical shakers inside the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer will attempt to loosen clumped soils on the device's screens to allow material to fall into the oven for analysis later in the week.

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Blobrana · L

The arm of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander released a handful of clumpy Martian soil onto a screened opening of a laboratory instrument on the spacecraft Friday, but the instrument did not confirm that any of the sample passed through the screen.
Engineers and scientists on the Phoenix team assembled at the University of Arizona are determining the best approach to get some of that material into the instrument. Meanwhile, the team has developed commands for the spacecraft to use cameras and the Robotic Arm on Saturday to study how strongly the soil from the top layer of the surface clings together into clumps.

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Blobrana · L

The first sample of Martian dirt dumped onto the opening of the Phoenix lander's tiny testing oven failed to reach the instrument and scientists said Saturday they will devote a few days to trying to determine the cause.

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Blobrana · L

Could Phoenixs search for organic molecules on Mars be foiled by dandruff from Earth? After a successful landing last month on the planets northern plains, the NASA spacecraft is busily scraping through the martian dirt. Next week, the mission team plans to use one of its premier instruments, the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA), to test its first baked soil sample for molecules containing carbon.

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A microscope on NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander has taken images of dust and sand particles with the greatest resolution ever returned from another planet.
The mission's Optical Microscope observed particles that had fallen onto an exposed surface, revealing grains as small as one-tenth the diameter of a human hair.

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