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NASA's Phoenix Finally Fills Oven
JoeRobe writes "Phoenix has successfully filled oven #4 of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument (TEGA). They have spent several days now vibrating the screen above the oven, trying to get a significant amount of soil sample into it. From the article: '[T]he oven might have filled because of the cumulative effects of all the vibrating, or because of changes in the soil's cohesiveness as it sat for days on the top of the screen.' Either way, this is the first step toward getting some interesting data from this instrument."
I don't think so. What would they be testing for that would be invalidated by this? If they find presence of life, or evidence of past life, the fact that they screened something out doesn't invalidate what they found in what was left. If they fail to find anything like that, there's no valid conclusion that could be drawn in any case (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), so a conclusion of "there's no life and never was" would be invalid regardless of whether parts of the sample were screened out or not.
In short, if it's a partial sample, it reduces the odds of success, but does not invalidate any result.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
There's no such thing as a "false negative" for the kind of tests they're doing. They're not conducting the kinds of experiments that would falsify a theory. The only results possible from the tests they're doing are "confirmed" or "failed to confirm" (and nothing much can be concluded from the latter in any case).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
We're talking about introducing material into an oven to be vaporized for Mass Spec analysis. You don't want or need to deal with huge amounts of material to tell what compounds are in the soil.