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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."
Mars, apparently. Didn't know he was into that sort of thing. But then he is Roman.
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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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?
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.
And yet all it would take is for a human to crumble the soil in his hand.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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 :)
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.
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.
$ man vibrator
No manual entry for vibrator
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.
Could be worse - it might have been Uranus, after all.
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum."
to which phoenix replies to mars regarding the short circuit: "i swear, this has never happened before..."
Good people go to bed earlier.