First Look at Martian Soil by Phoenix
”It’s been more than 11 years since we had the idea to send a microscope to Mars and I’m absolutely gobsmacked that we’re now looking at the soil of Mars at a resolution that has never been seen before,” said Tom Pike of Imperial College London. He is a Phoenix co-investigator working on the lander’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer.
*****************************************************************************
Today the eyes of the world are on Mars, with the first telescope actually on the planet and viewing its soil to analyze for not only water or ice but also life origins. Lots of time, effort, and money has went into this project, with NASA’s scientist working ’round the clock to make sure it works correctly, regardless how fine the screen is!!
Using its robotic arm after a rocky (no pun intended) start, the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander has been able to finally look at Martian soil along the landing site, delivering the soil particles to its optical microscope which zoomed in about 2 microns—the smallest particle every seen before on Mars. In this tiny batch of Martian soil, a wide variety of soil sizes, colors and types were able to be viewed—some as small as the human hair.
So far, the Martian soil is containing the typical greenish mineral olivine or the characteristic orange soil of the planet. But one particle—black, glassy and round in shape—appear to be volcanic glass. What the microscopic images are showing to NASA scientists are that the heavy thick clumpiness of the soil, preventing most of it from going through the screen, goes to the microscopic levels and consist of even finer particles which have caused massive problems for the Phoenix mission from the beginning. What saved it was the machine’s vibrator could loosen enough to get it past the machine’s screen for analyzing, which will be sent back to NASA’s Phoenix lander scientists very soon.
NASA has found the stickiness of the soil that has presented so many challenges is actually presenting scientific opportunities. “Understanding the soil is a major goal of this mission and the soil is a bit different than we expected,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “There could be real discoveries to come as we analyze this soil with our various instruments. We have just the right instruments for the job.”
This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 5:55 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
