Phoenix Scrapes ‘Almost Perfect’ Icy Soil for Analysis

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander enlarged the “Snow White” trench and scraped up
little piles of icy soil on Saturday, June 28, the 33rd Martian day, or sol, of
the mission. Scientists say that the scrapings are ideal for the lander’s
analytical instruments.

The robotic arm on Phoenix used the blade on its scoop to make 50 scrapes in the
icy layer buried under subsurface soil. The robotic arm then heaped the
scrapings into a few 10- to 20-cubic centimeter piles, or piles each containing
between two and four teaspoonfuls. Scraping created a grid about two millimeters
deep.

The scientists saw the scrapings in Surface Stereo Imager images on Sunday, June
29, agreed they had “almost perfect samples of the interface of ice and soil,”
and commanded the robotic arm to pick up some scrapings for instrument
analysis.

The scoop will sprinkle the fairly fine-grained material first onto the Thermal
and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. The instrument has tiny ovens to bake and
sniff the soil to assess its volatile ingredients, such as water. It can
determine the melting point of ice.

Phoenix’s overall goals are to: dig to water frozen under subsurface soil,
touch, examine, vaporize and sniff the soil and ice to discover the history of
water on Mars, determine if the Martian arctic soil could support life and
study Martian weather from a polar perspective.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of 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, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish
Meteorological Institute. For more information about the Phoenix Mars Mission,
visit the Web pages http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu and
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix.