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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."
It's pretty interesting learning about the problems encountered while analyzing alien soil, but I'm not even going to touch that vibrator comment.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
How many of you saw the word "vibrator" and clicked it?
There's got to be a joke in here somewhere.... Wet nature... Drop into the oven... Got to think... Lemme get another beer.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Why stop there? Anything can be a euphemism.
Frustrates phoenix...Wet nature...drop into the oven...get stuck in the scoop...damaged the lander...and of course, the universal problem everyone faces: ...the vibrator had to be used longer than designed, resulting in a short circuit.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Considering that this is from the "pulling-out-doesn't-sound-manly dept." I think the editor was all too happy to play along.
Timothy may also be getting an email shortly from Taco.
What exactly is 'wet' about the soil? I see that the soil is icy (H2O ice or CO2 ice?), but as far as I knew 'wet' and 'icy' are mutually exclusive. Perhaps 'sticky' would be a better term? Or... is this some kind of cool ice that is 'wet' at very cold temperatures as opposed to good old fashioned dry ice?
This would make my day. I'm a girl btw :)
A Phoenix putting something into an oven... there go our tax dollars! Any competent phoenix would wait until its body burst into flame, then use the spare heat to analyze the sample.
I don't know about you, but I intend to write to my Congressperson.
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Thousands are enslaved every day: http://www.riverofinnocents.com/
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
The research data collected from this event would be used to pave the way for human colonization of Mars. I hope...
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.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
If you use the vibrator, obviously the scoop is going to get wet.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That's how it goes when they send a vibrator to do a mans job. Anyway, are the exploring that hole they found a while back?
Because they are relatively cheap you can screw up plenty and still do the work for less cost than a manned mission.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And we couldn't implement "ice-cream" scoop technology =P
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
There's got to be a joke in here somewhere....
Mars hasn't had contact with any life forms in hundreds of millions of years, at least. Of course it needed an unusually long time with the vibrator.
After the loss of the first vehicle, they did extensive testing. The whole Phoenix story is truly rising from the ashes, and very interesting. I think it was on the Discovery channel.
My first thought was gravity as well, though I'd think we have enough physics simulations that we could at least do simulated testing under low grav. Looking at the homepage for Phoenix, it looks like they are looking into heat caused by the rasping might be contributing to the problem. Digging holes on Mars just isn't the same as digging them in your backyard, at least not yet.
He would not have survived the trip or the landing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yeah, we could have found out exactly what Martian soil is like beforehand. We should just send up a robot to scoop some up and analyze it...oh wait.
Since I'm a guy and all :)
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
They should have had you on the mission? I am sure that you really would have expected the exact kind of conditions that they had. After all, being nearly 2x as far from the sun, in the middle of winter, you might be more worried about hardness of items rather than stickiness, but that is just me. To be honest, I seriously doubt that you or the other ludites could even get a rock off this planet let alone deliver something to another planet.
BTW, if NASA is SOOO incompetent, why do they have a much better record at delivering vehicles to other planets than ANY other group? Me, I have my issues with them, but I have worked on a small part of MGS and know that there is a lot involved. These folks are doing good work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seems that Mars is a harsh mister
You ever run a front end loader? In January when the temperature is 9 below zero Fahrenheit? You know the 'scoop' on the front of the loader is called a 'bucket'? What happens when the loader operator digs into a pile of steaming coal, or gravel? The material is 'steaming' because it is warmer and wet than ambient air. The bucket is -9 degrees F, and the material freezes in the bucket. What does come out of the bucket goes into a dump truck (in some cases), where it freezes to the inside walls, corners and bottom of the dump body. At the end of the day, the truck driver, and the loader operator have to dig that material out by hand, with a shovel. Been there, done that. Why would it be any different on mars with colder temperatures, and 38% earth normal gravity?
The word "wet" implies the presence of a meaningful amount of liquid water. In this regard, the soil at the site is very unlikely to be wet (and note that the linked articles don't actually say that it is). The temperature and pressure conditions at the site only allow for solid and gas phases for H2O. Solid ice slowly converts to gas through sublimation when the ice is exposed by the scoop. Materials can clump for a variety of reasons. For example, lunar soil can cling to itself and to things like spacesuits even though absolutely no water is present at all. All sorts of factors can influence the cohesion of planetary soils, including the physical shapes of soil grains, the electrostatic properties of the grains, binding by spatter through micrometeorite bombardment (unlikely on Mars due to atmospheric protection) and, in the case of the Mars soils, even small amounts of ice have the potential to bind grains.
Yo mama ...
may have damaged the lander because the vibrator had to be used longer than designed
If Phoenix isn't working, I'm sure Firefox shall fix all that stuff.
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
NASA scientists break vibrator
The Phoenix was built by the UofA... No wet, clumpy soil in AZ.
I wonder if it would be that silly to try and turn the scooper upside down and LIGHLTY bang it on the inside of the oven so that gravity can do the rest and let it fall out...although I dont know how sturdy that oven is nor do I know if the robot is able to apply small pressure turns instead of full tilt ones.
Sounds like one too many what-ifs got pruned from the decision tree. Nice. Probably saved a couple million bucks on the ground, got the pup out the door, and sent it all the way to Mars before it flushed its entire budget into thin air. Speaking as a taxpayer, at least the show's been entertaining.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_