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."

Comments

Re:What were they thinking?

[SBacks]

Why would they have designed the thing to have such a low tolerance filter in the first place? Cuz they had to strap it on a rocket and shoot it to Mars? I kinda doubt a full sized lab furnace would be under the weight requirement.

Re:invalidate the tests

[osu-neko]

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).

Re:What were they thinking?

[drrck]

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.