Soil Studies Continue at Phoenix Mars Lander Site

Soil Studies Continue at Phoenix Mars Lander Site
August 9, 2008

Vibration of the screen above a laboratory oven on NASA's Phoenix Mars
Lander on
Saturday, Aug. 9, succeeded in getting enough soil into the oven to
begin
analysis. Commands were sent for the lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas
Analyzer
(TEGA) to begin analysis Sunday of the soil sample from a trench
called "Rosy
Red."

Phoenix's robotic arm delivered soil Thursday from the Rosy Red trench
through a
narrow opening to a screen above the No. 5 oven on the lander's TEGA.
A few
particles of the sample passed through the screen on Thursday, but not
enough
to fill the oven and allow analysis of the sample to begin. The
Phoenix team
sent commands for TEGA to vibrate the screen again on Friday, and more
material
reached the oven, though still not enough to proceed with analysis.

"There appear to be clumps blocking the opening," Doug Ming of NASA
Johnson
Space Center, Houston, the Phoenix team's science lead, said on
Friday.
"However, we have seen in the past that when this soil sits for a
while, it
disperses. We intend to fill an oven with this material, either by
additional
vibration of the same screen or by opening doors to one of the other
TEGA
cells."

Friday activities by the spacecraft included extending the width of an
exploratory trench informally named "Neverland," which extends between
two
rocks on the surface of the ground.

The lander last week also made overnight measurements of conductivity
in the
Martian soil. The conductivity measurements completed Wednesday, Aug.
6, ran
from the afternoon of Phoenix's 70th Martian day, or sol, after
landing to the
morning of Sol 71. A fork-like probe inserted into the soil checks how
well
heat and electricity move through the soil from one prong to another.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith from The University of
Arizona 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 in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany;
and the
Finnish Meteorological Institute. The California Institute of
Technology in
Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Sara Hammond
University of Arizona
520-626-4402
shammond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Veronica McGregor/Guy Webster
NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
818-354-5011
veronica.mcgregor@xxxxxxxxx gov
guy.webster@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Dwayne Brown
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown@xxxxxxxx

WEB LINKS:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix

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