"The Ground Moved"
Reason for cheers for scientists at NASA, JPL and the
University of Arizona in Tucson Wednesday... as the Phoenix
Mars Lander has filled its first oven with Martian soil.
"We have an oven full," Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of
the University of Arizona, Tucson, said. "It took 10 seconds to
fill the oven. The ground moved."
Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument,
or TEGA, for Phoenix. The instrument has eight separate tiny ovens
to bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such
as water.
The lander's Robotic Arm delivered a partial scoopful of clumpy
soil from a trench informally called "Baby Bear" to the number 4
oven on TEGA last Friday, June 6, which was 12 days after
landing.
A screen covers each of TEGA's eight ovens. The screen is to
prevent larger bits of soil from clogging the narrow port to each
oven so that fine particles fill the oven cavity, which is no wider
than a pencil lead. Each TEGA chute also has a "whirligig"
mechanism that vibrates the screen to help shake small particles
through.
As ANN reported, NASA
experienced difficulties when it first attempted to send Martian
soil through the screen, and into the oven. Only a few particles
got through when the screen on oven number 4 was vibrated on June
6, 8 and 9.
Boynton said that the 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.
"There's something very unusual about this soil, from a place on
Mars we've never been before," said Phoenix Principal Investigator
Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "We're interested in
learning what sort of chemical and mineral activity has caused the
particles to clump and stick together."
Plans prepared by the Phoenix team for the lander's activities
on Thursday, June 12 include sprinkling Martian soil on the
delivery port for the spacecraft's Optical Microscope and taking
additional portions of a high-resolution color panorama of the
lander's surroundings.
The Phoenix mission is led by Smith with project management at
JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, located in
Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space
Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities
of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany;
and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.