[meteorite-list] Phoenix Scoops First Soil Sample for Laboratory Analysis

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-101

NASA Mars Lander Scoops First Soil Sample for Laboratory Analysis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
June 06, 2008

TUCSON, Ariz. -- NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander made its first dig into
Martian soil for science studies and is poised to deliver the scoopful
to a laboratory instrument on the lander deck.

The instrument will bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile
ingredients, such as water.

Commands were received by Phoenix Friday, June 6, for the spacecraft's
Robotic Arm to dump the sample into an opened door on the instrument
called the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA.

"It's looks like a good sample for us," said Peter Smith, Phoenix
principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "Over the
next few days, and it may be as much as a week, the TEGA instrument will
be analyzing this sample."

Phoenix's Robotic Arm collected the sample of clumpy, reddish material
from the top 2 to 4 centimeters (0.8 to 1.6 inches) of surface material
at a site informally named "Baby Bear" on the north side of the lander.
In the past week, engineers had used the arm to collect two practice
scoops adjacent to Baby Bear and dump those scoopfuls back onto the
surface. They have prepared for years with simulations and versions of
the arm on Earth.

"It's like being on a football team and having a pre-season that lasted
five years, and now we're finally playing first game," said Matt
Robinson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. He is
the robotic arm flight software lead for the Phoenix team.

The move was calculated to get enough material to be sure to get some
delivered into the instrument without inundating the instrument with
unnecessary extra soil. "We're ecstatic that we got a quarter to a third
of a scoopful," Robinson said.

The TEGA instrument will begin analyzing the sample for water and
mineral content after it has analyzed a sample of the Martian
atmosphere. Water can be bound to minerals, such as clays or carbonates,
and it takes more heat to drive the water off some minerals than others.
This is how the instrument can identify some minerals in the soil.

"We are particularly interested in minerals that are formed or altered
by the action of liquid water in the soil," Smith said.

The Phoenix mission is led by Smith at the University of Arizona with
project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed
Martin, 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. For more about Phoenix, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix and http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Media contacts: Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov

Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson
shammond at lpl.arizona.edu

2008-101