Mars Soil Frustrates Phoenix Again

Tablizer writes "The Phoenix Mars lander has been frustrated yet again by Mars's odd soil. The wet nature of the soil they are targeting appears to have made it get stuck in the scoop rather than drop into the oven. Past problems with similarly clumpy soil may have damaged the lander because the vibrator had to be used longer than it was designed for, resulting in a short circuit."

Comments

Preparation Oversight

[Joebert]

I don't mean to troll, but I'd like to think that in a mission they're hoping to find water or ice or something along those lines, they'd anticipate the possibility of moist soil when designing their instruments.

Hopefully the next mission includes an icecream scoop.

Re:Preparation Oversight

[thewiz]

Sounds like the soil is the consistency of clay. Trying to get clay out of a scoop takes water and a lot of patience.

Re:Inadequate testing?

[timmarhy]

i'm guessing the lower gravity is why it didn't work scooping wet dirt like it did on earth. i'm pretty sure they tested it as well as possible.

Unmanned missions

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The nice thing about robomissions is that they are so much cheaper than manned missions and there are no widows when things do wrong.

Because they are relatively cheap you can screw up plenty and still do the work for less cost than a manned mission.

Re:Unmanned missions

[RetroGeek]

The nice thing about robomissions is that they are so much cheaper than manned missions and there are no widows when things do wrong.

And yet all it would take is for a human to crumble the soil in his hand.

Re:Unmanned missions

[DerekLyons]

Because they are relatively cheap you can screw up plenty and still do the work for less cost than a manned mission.

The problem is, they aren't relatively cheap. You pay a fraction of the cost, and you get less than a fraction of the science.

Re:Unmanned missions

[jd]

On the other hand, humans are far more adaptable and can modify plans and experiments in a way no robot yet built could. Sometimes, you have to take the risks. If you want to consider costs, then let's say a robust manned mission costs fifty times as much as a robot mission. If you consider the missions that produced uncertain results (Viking landers and early probe photographs), minimal results (Phoenix) or no results at all (everything that has crashed), you are beginning to approach the cost of a manned mission, where a manned mission could have produced ALL of the useful data so far collected AND much of the data that has been lost due to unexpected conditions and unforeseen circumstances.

Yes, manned missions are extremely risky, and that means a danger of bereavement, but it is better to die with your boots on, making the discoveries of a lifetime, than to live in fear at the back of a cave. Indeed, if we look at places that are most risk-averse, we see that unexpected risks (when they arise) are actually the more dangerous for it. Risk aversity is no healthier than plunging straight into danger without care. Indeed, in a way, it is the same thing, except being risk-averse means you are always plunging into unknown dangers, never known ones. The correct solution is always to be risk-aware, to anticipate and minimize, but never to eliminate, danger. Eliminating danger is probably the most dangerous thing you can ever do.

Re:Unmanned missions

[blind biker]

I strongly agree. One of my life mottos is:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Mark Twain

Re:Unmanned missions

[Shihar]

There are two very large problems with a manned Mars mission.

1) It cost a shit ton of money. Don't give me "but it just costs X days of Iraq war!!!" crap. That might be true, but Americans will open up their pocket books for "making the world a safer place". They lynch presidents that spend a few trillion on science experiments. Sure, we did it with Apollo, but that fell into the "making the world a safer place... by kick the ass of the communist in a metaphorical sense". If it Apollo had been pure science, it would have never of flown. Because Apollo was about one upping the commies, we were okay with it.

2) It is a suicide mission. Sure, there are plenty of people that would sign up for a suicide mission if it meant they got to stick their boot print on Mars first. That doesn't change the fact that it would never fly. Americans, and even more extreme, Europeans, are extraordinarily risk adverse to the point of absurdity. Pools kill thousands of kids and no one really cars. Unhealthy food kills an absurd number of Americans (millions) and we just shrug it off. Toss an airplane into a building and kill a couple thousand and all of a sudden it is OMG OMG LETS CHANGE SOCIETY AND TOSS OUT CIVIL LIBERTIES TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS MINOR AMOUNT OF DEATH NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!!!11!!! KILL ALL THE ARABS!!!! NEVER AGAIN!!!1!!!! Europeans are even sillier these days where NATO and UN have to beg plead and extort to get a handful of European soldiers to come within a few hundred miles of a place where they might possibly get shot at. NASA blows up a shuttle filled with adrenaline junkies every quarter of a century, and now we can't fly the foolish things if a bird happens to fly by and drop a shit on one before it takes off.

Our (western) priorities are so far out of whack and screwed up that this will never happen. The monetary argument is at least logical and something I can get behind. The utter terror at letting someone willingly sacrifice themselves doing something they want to do is a sign that our lives are way the hell too comfy.

Space exploration is dead to humans until someone finds a cheap way for individuals to get into space, governments to damned. The second you can head west, hit the California coast, and go up a few thousand miles, you will have the US population drop by 10% as the crazy pioneer genes that are still floating around from the crazy immigrants that pushed into the US over the past few hundred years reassert themselves and people throw themselves into space.

Until that day, the pragmatic and rational folks are going to tell you to fuck off once they see the price tag, and the people begging for a nanny state will break down into tears cry about the inhumanity of it all to let a person willing sacrifice themselves.

Re:Unmanned missions

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself there. Why exactly should we come and clean up after you start not one, but two illegal and pointless wars?

As a European (a Finn), I'd like to correct you: The war in Aghanistan has at no point been illegal and maybe your memory isn't all that good but European strongly supported action against Aghanistan as a consequence of their decision not to hand over Osama - NATO members to the point that they for the first time in the history of the organization invoced the collective defence clause. One source of many:
http://www.euractiv.com/en/general/nato-invokes-collective-defence-clause-support-us/article-113773

The war in Iraq was illegal because international law states (in brief) that
(1) military action against another country is illegal except in two cases:
(2) it's legal as an immediate defensive action
(3) it's legal if it has a UN mandate

Arguably, neither case was true and ironically any military action by Iraq against the US would've been legal but actually probably only resulted in making action by the US slightly legitimate instead. Considering that the US had recognized Iraq's independence and is a UN member and in its constitution talks about honouring all treaties with foreign powers (and I'd say that UN membership is a treaty with plenty of foreign powers) it wasn't necessarily illegal under international law only... But that's for Americans to decide and sort out appropriately.

And just in case your curious, I'd like to add that when the Iraq war began, I was personally in favour of it (to some extent as a consequence of an Iraqi friend here being cautiously optimistic about it then). With the benefit of hindsight, I'm tempted to say that once Saddam was toppled, the US should've pretty much gotten the fuck out and left the Iraqis to shape their country into something better. That way the action would only have served to speed up what would've happened anyway at some point - eventually the Iraqis themselves would've gotten rid of him one way or another. The result now could hardly be worse than the current situation and I fail to see why the US couldn't have gotten back in, if necessary. The worst case would of course have been a country with various factions fighting each other, which isn't very tempting to invade so any estimate of the number of casualties made beforehand would've been made higher (and thus probably closer to what the number has turned out to be now) and such an invasion would obviously have been harder to sell to a domestic audience - not to mention to explain to the masses when there's no single "bad guy" to get rid of anymore. Sadly, I've - whilst following the news - seen signs that the Iraqis just might have done a pretty good job. To me the suggestion many Iraqis made to instead of creating a new Iraqi army "clean" the existing one and let that maintain order. It was a functioning army so simply trying officers suspected of war crimes could've gotten it in shape quickly. But all that is of course pointless speculation.

Re:Unmanned missions

[Anonymous Coward]

Why exactly should we come and clean up after you start not one, but two illegal and pointless wars?

You could well argue that Afganistan is a pointless war, but unlike Iraq, there is no serious arguement for it being illegal. The Taleban were in charge, they were hosting the Al-Queda leaders, and those leaders ordered the 9/11 attack. Self-defense gave the US (and arguably the UK and other countires whose citizens died) the right to remove the Taleban. AFAIK the Afgan invasion was also endored fully by the UN.
The Iraq war on the other hand was based on lies and misrepresentations and arguebly did not have UN endorsement.

Except....

[EmbeddedJanitor]

He would not have survived the trip or the landing.

Actually,

[WindBourne]

this was tested in all sorts of areas around the earth. To make something like this IS difficult. It is part of the reason why I really want to see us on mars. Once we are there, all the exploration will continue to be by robotics. It is just that ppl on the planet will put these systems together as well as fix them. I suspect that the fun jobs will still be handled by ppl on earth.

One Big Mega-Probe, or Incremental?

[Tablizer]

Your joke raises an interesting question: is it cheaper to send up a single big swiss-army probe that has everything, or simpler probes that use lessons borrowed from the last probe? Phoenix is relatively cheap, probe-wise, such that its not like we put all our eggs in one basket on this one. A later probe can now be more focused to the task based on known soil characteristics.

It is hard to calculate a clean answer to such questions without having some experience with different designs. Mars is still a new world. Our experience with biology experiments with Viking suggests that the incremental approach may be better. We've learned how Mars may "trick" such experiments and how sneaky life can be based on Earth samples. We can now design experiments that rule out the traps that Viking discovered. Sure, we'll probably find new traps along the way, but nobody says exploration must be easy.
         

Phoenix Mars Mission Logo

[GodfatherofSoul]

It looks suspiciously similar to the Firefox logo, I wonder if the artist was the same. At least he got the face pointed in the right direction this time.