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."

Comments

A shame that the first attempt was a flop!

[BigBadBus]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7442233.stm

Re:A shame that the first attempt was a flop!

[SiliconEntity]

They made it so they can shake the screen and hopefully get some material through. They just haven't shaken it yet, everything is done slowly and carefully and checked many times before they take the next step.

As for the ice, the digger has a sort of drill on it that is supposed to grind up the ice into fine shavings, and then those shavings are what will be picked up and dumped in. So when they are ready for ice, that should be in small pieces that can get through the screen. They have a bunch of ovens so even if this one stays clogged they can still use some of the others for the ice samples, which is more important.

If they can't get any dirt into the oven, they might be able to use the ice drill on the dirt to get some finer pieces if they want to try again on that.

Mod OP down.

[goodmanj]

*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?

Re:Mod OP down.

[CraftyJack]

Better yet, skip the tech blogs and go to the source: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/ http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/main.php

Re:dig down further

[Anonymous Coward]

Those bacteria in greenland were what, 2 miles into the ice? They're gonna need a longer digging arm.

There are bacteria on the top too. You just didn't hear about it, because it's obvious there are bacteria on the top. Finding them deep in the ice was news.

A Better Update...

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:I wonder what kind of flyer miles I'll get?

[quanticle]

We have no experience of long-duration space flight outside Earth's magnetic field. The longest (and only) manned flights outside it have been to the Moon and lasted only a couple days. We are talking about multi-year flight with little protection from cosmic radiation. We need to properly shield the spaceship or they will be cooked before they get there.

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?