* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: The Phoenix lander

Blobrana · L

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander repositioned its robotic arm slightly Tuesday and is now poised to deliver Martian soil to its wet chemistry laboratory.
Sample delivery and analysis is planned as the science highlight on Wednesday, the 30th Martian day of the mission. Phoenix is to perform the first-ever wet-chemistry experiment on polar Martian terrain, testing the soil for salts, acidity and other characteristics.

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Blobrana · L

Nasa's Phoenix lander has unearthed "perfect" evidence of ice on Mars.
Chunks of a bright material found in a trench dug by the craft have disappeared over four Martian days, suggesting they have vapourised.
Digging in another trench has been halted as the lander's arm hit a hard surface - also thought to be ice.

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Currently, the temperature in the Martian polar region ranges from about minus 30 to minus 85 degrees Celsius.

Blobrana · L

NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission generated an unusually high volume of spacecraft housekeeping data on Tuesday causing the loss of some non-critical science data. Phoenix engineers are analysing why this anomaly occurred. The science team is planning spacecraft activities for Thursday that will not rely on Phoenix storing science data overnight but will make use of multiple communication relays to gain extra data quantity.

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Blobrana · L

Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporised after digging exposed it.

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Blobrana · L

Image of a trench dug by the Phoenix lander on Sol 19.

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Credit NASA

Blobrana · L

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University/NASA Ames

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander began digging in an area called "Wonderland" early Tuesday, taking its first scoop of soil from a polygonal surface feature within the "national park" region that mission scientists have been preserving for science.
The lander's Robotic Arm created the new test trench called "Snow White" on June 17, the 22nd Martian day, or sol, after the Phoenix spacecraft landed on May 25. Newly planned science activities will resume no earlier than Sol 24 as engineers look into how the spacecraft is handling larger than expected amounts of data.

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Blobrana · L

Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt?
That's the question bedevilling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.
Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.

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Blobrana · L

Day after day, scientists at the University of Arizona receive gifts in the form of pictures.

"Everyday has been like Christmas" - Pat Woida.

Woida's the first member of the Phoenix team to see the many images the landers camera takes every day. It's those pictures that show the team what Phoenix was able to accomplish on Mars.

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Blobrana · L

A space probe sent to search for signs of water on Mars has found unusually "sticky soil" on the Red Planet which scientists believe may hold the first ice to be collected from an alien world.

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