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Phoenix Digs First Mars Soil Sample To Analyze
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly two weeks after its historic landing, the US Mars probe Phoenix has scooped up its first sample of Martian soil and begun analyzing it for water and organic compounds.
The test dig made Sunday by the Phoenix Mars Lander's 8-foot-long robotic arm uncovered bits of bright specks in the soil believed to be ice or salt.
Mission controllers will send instructions to the lander to dump the sample into one of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) ovens. The TEGA ovens, which are about an inch long and the diameter of a pencil lead, will heat up the soil samples and use a mass spectrometer to detect the gases that come off the samples, which will shed light on some of the materials in the soil, specifically those formed by the process of liquid water."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7442233.stm
My web domain.
*Sigh*. If you're going to use Slashdot to pimp your pointless tech blog, please at least make sure your information is up-to-date.
Latest news: dirt seems to be stuck, possibly too cakey to enter test chamber. Engineers are working on a solution.
Now where's *my* ten million site visits?
[insert lame sig here]
Two reasons. The first is, as the other poster said, the fairly steep mass and volume penalty paid for being mobile. The second is that there is no chance of an extended mission here - come winter, Phoenix dies. Period.
Not quite period. While the likelihood of it surviving is very low, they have planned for that eventuality by building in a "lazarus mode" to make it try to call back if it manages to survive the winter.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Rather than complain about stale stories, link to newer ones. You may even get modpoints for it. Anyhow, here's the best update I've found so far:
http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001501
They are having problems getting the soil to go through the screen. Although one of the pod doors (insert HAL jokes) didn't open all the way, the soil appears to have reached the screen based on the images. They dumped an extra-large load to compensate for the jammed door. The problem is that the sensors did not detect any soil going through the screen. They are now trying to figure out if its the nature of the soil (clumpy?) or an instrument problem.
If its an instrument failure, fortunately they have 7 other "ovens" to try. Redundancy is nice.
Table-ized A.I.
Contrary to popular opinion that there were weight/cost considerations, the reason is that a rover simply wasn't needed. As an example, if you're going to check whether a lake has fresh water or salt water, it doesn't matter where you take your sample. The water isn't going to be any different at the dock than it is in the middle of the lake, or off the far shore. Similarly, if you're going to test the composition of permafrost, you land in the middle of a permafrost field, and test. It's not going to make much of a difference if you test where you land, or test 30 metres to the left.
If the science goals called for a rover, they would have sent a rover, and the weight/cost considerations would have been modified.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's a fair point, and one that I don't think that people emphasize enough. The difficulty of designing a life-support system for long term spaceflight is not to be underestimated.
It has to be big enough to carry crew, supplies and spare parts for the redundant system. We are talking about something the size of the IIS, with a big engine attached to it. Even if we don't use solar panels and go nuclear (in violation of several annoying treaties), the spaceship required would be quite big.Why would the spaceship require an especially large engine? In space you don't have nearly the same amount of friction and drag that you do on Earth. Even relatively small rockets can be effective once you're outside the atmosphere.
There is also the question of the Mars landing. We have never landed anything there that's bigger than my desk. We are talking about a powered landing of several habitats, supply-storage facilities and fuel manufacturing facilities and the solar or nuclear power required to power them.Who says we have to deliver it all in one giant load? It'd be much more effective to launch all of the supplies ahead of the astronauts and make sure that everything had landed properly before sending humans on their way.
As for coming back, we will have to conduct a launch of a reusable, probably single-stage-to-orbit (as we want to cut down complexity as much as we can), vehicle. We never did that, but Mars has a more forgiving gravity than the Earth and we may already have the proper technology for that.Why does the orbiter have to be "reusable"? I mean, look at the Apollo missions - the lunar lander had a single-use return to Earth module. Shouldn't we use a beefed up variant of that design?
After that, the vehicle I just described must dock with the return vehicle (which may of may not be the same vehicle they arrived in) to return to Earth.Assuming that you've got the life support requirements worked out (which you've had to do in order to make the trip out to Mars), this procedure is virtually identical to the procedure that the Apollo astronauts had to do in order to return to Earth. The LEM had to dock with the command module for the return trip. This is the same thing, only you're docking with something like the ISS, rather than the Apollo command module.
It's hugely complicated.That it is, but you're forgetting that a lot of it has already been done
Let's get back to the Moon first, make sure we have the technology to survive there for long periods and then venture on to Mars. A dozen dead astronauts won't help.How will living on the moon help us with going to Mars, pray tell? The moon is still inside the Earth's magnetic field, so it won't help us with the most pressing issue - designing a craft to carry humans through interplanetary space. And, as for the other problems, they were already all solved during the '60s. Why do we need to solve them again?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It depends. Earth and Mars don't necessarily stay in lock step with each other. Also, a Martian year is approximately two Earth years. Mars axis tilt is similar to Earth's (25 degrees), so it has experiences seasonal temperature changes (more severe than Earth due to the lack of atmosphere which provides insulation and heat transport on Earth). The blog on the Phoenix lander web site basically comes out and says that in roughly 150 days (Martian days are nearly the same as Earth days) there will not be enough incident sunlight on the solar panels to continue operating the electronics and heaters. Phoenix will freeze to death.