Category: Missions

The Phoenix Mars Lander used its robotic arm to deliver a second sample of soil for analysis by the spacecraft’s wet chemistry laboratory. Data received from Phoenix on Sunday night confirmed the soil was in the lab’s cell number 1. This image taken by the the lander’s Surface Stereo Imager shows the Robotic Arm scoop positioned over the Wet Chemistry Lab Cell 1 delivery funnel on Sol 41, or July 6. Test results will be compared in coming days to the results from the first Martian soil analyzed by the wet chemistry laboratory two weeks ago. That laboratory is part of Phoenix’s Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer.

On Monday, Phoenix also tested a method for scraping up a sample of icy material and getting it into the scoop at the end of the robotic arm. Photography before, during and after the process will allow evaluation of this method. If the test goes well, the science team plans to use this method for gathering the next sample to be delivered to Phoenix’s bake-and-sniff instrument, the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA). The science team wants to be as precise and quick as possible in delivering the next sample to TEGA, as it possibly could be the last time the ovens can be used because of a short circuit that may occur the next time the oven is activated.

News Source: U of Arizona

Until humans can actually set foot on the Red Planet, the next best thing would be a sample return mission, to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth. A sample return would exponentially increase our knowledge and understanding Mars and its environment. And in order to pull off a mission of this magnitude, international cooperation might be required, and in fact, may be preferred. The International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG), organized an international committee to study an international architecture for a Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission concept. After several months of collective work by scientists and engineers from several countries worldwide, the “iMARS” group is ready to publish the outcome of its deliberations and the envisioned common architecture for a future international MSR mission, and they will discuss their findings at an international conference on July 9 and 10 in France.

The conference will be held at the Auditorium of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and will bring together members of the scientific and industrial communities as well as representatives of space agencies around the world to discuss the status and prospects for Mars exploration over the coming decades. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear the current international thinking on Mars Sample Return and to interact with key players in the global endeavor of exploring and understanding Mars.

A Mars Sample Return mission would use robotic systems and a Mars ascent rocket to collect and send samples of Martian rocks, soils, and atmosphere to Earth for detailed chemical and physical analysis. Researchers on Earth could measure chemical and physical characteristics much more precisely than they could by via remote control. On Earth, they would have the flexibility to make changes as needed for intricate sample preparation, instrumentation, and analysis if they encountered unexpected results. In addition, for decades to come, the collected Mars rocks could yield new discoveries as future generations of researchers apply new technologies in studying them.

Keynote speakers at the upcoming conferencewill are Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator under the MER mission, and Jean-Pierre Bibring of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, principal investigator for a key instrument on Mars Express.

Interested in attending? Check out their website

Original News Source: ESA

The “vibrating” done to get the first Mars arctic soil sample into Phoenix’s TEGA (Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer) oven may have caused a short circuit that could happen again the next time the oven is used, perhaps with fatal results. A team of engineers and scientists assembled to assess TEGA after a short circuit was discovered in the instrument, and came to a fairly disheartening conclusion. “Since there is no way to assess the probability of another short circuit occurring, we are taking the most conservative approach and treating the next sample to TEGA as possibly our last,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator. Therefore, the Phoenix team is doing everything they can to assure the next sample delivered to TEGA will be ice-rich.

The short circuit was believed to have been caused when TEGA’s oven number four was vibrated repeatedly over the course of several days to break up clumpy soil so that it could get inside the oven. Delivery to any TEGA oven involves a vibration action, and turning on the vibrator in any oven will cause oven number 4 to vibrate as well, which could cause a short.

A sample taken from the trench called “Snow White” that was in Phoenix’s robotic arm’s scoop earlier this week likely has dried out, so the soil particles are to be delivered to the lander’s optical microscope on Thursday. If material remains in the scoop, the rest will be deposited in the Wet Chemistry Laboratory, possibly early on Sunday.

The mission teams will mark the Independence Day holiday with a planned “stand down” from Thursday morning, July 3, to Saturday evening, July 5. A skeleton crew at the University of Arizona in Tucson, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colo., will continue to monitor the spacecraft and its instruments over the holiday period.

“The stand down is a chance for our team to rest, but Phoenix won’t get a holiday,” Smith said. The spacecraft will be operating from pre-programmed science commands, taking atmospheric readings and panoramas and other images.

Once the sample is delivered to the chemistry experiment, Smith said the highest priority will be obtaining the ice-rich sample and delivering it to TEGA’s oven number zero.

The Phoenix team will conduct tests and trial runs so the instruments can deliver the icy sample quickly, in order to avoid sublimation of materials during the delivery process, so the solid ice doesn’t vaporize.

Original News Source: Phoenix News

Phoenix’s scientific team team held a press conference today to officially make their big announcement, which was fairly evident from pictures on the Phoenix website late yesterday: They found what they have been looking for. “It is with great pride and lot of joy that announce today we have found the proof that we have been seeking that show that this hard, white material is water ice,” said the project’s principle investigator Peter Smith. The image here shows a trench dug by Phoenix’s robotic arm scoop that exposed a white area, and left a couple of small chunks of white material, which scientists thought could possibly be ice. A few days later, the ice is gone. “In the course of sitting through the cold and very dry Martian environment for several days, it sublimated,” said Mark Lemmon, co-investigator on the Phoenix’s Surface Stero Imager. “The ice went away into vapor without any melting taking place.” But how do the scientists know for sure this is water ice?

“We can easily and confidently rule out that its carbon dioxide ice,” said Lemmon. “There are certainly times of the year that there would be CO2 ice at this location but with the temperatures we are measuring there, it would be the equivalent of water ice existing on Earth at 140 degrees. It wouldn’t be there very long, and wouldn’t be there long enough for us to take its picture, and it wouldn’t last the night. We’re very confident this is not CO2 ice. We’re ruling out salt, because salt doesn’t react like this. We’re confident now that this is water ice. We’ve hit what we’re looking for. The job now is to find out what is mixed in with the ice, how much salt is there, how many organics are there, and these are the things we’ll need TEGA and MECA to solve.”

TEGA is the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer that “bakes and sniffs” out the chemical composition of the soil, and MECA is Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, a wet chemistry lab that measures levels of acidity, minerals, and conductivity in dirt samples.

Smith said the landing site was carefully chosen as a place where ice was very likely to exist, based on subsurface hydrogen detected by the orbiting 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

The team is now going to look for two things associated with the ice. “Does the ice melt, and does the melted ice environment allow a habitable zone on Mars,” said Smith. “That is a place where organic material and energy sources combined with liquid water can be a habitat for Martian life. We don’t have instruments that detect life itself. We’re looking at this stage for habitability, and it will be future missions that will look for life.”

The trick now is to get some of this white material into the TEGA instrument ovens before it sublimates. “The plan for sampling the ice is to gather it up rather quickly using the power tool called the Rasp and deliver it to the TEGA within 30 minutes,” said Ray Arvidson of the Phoenix team. The TEGA ovens do have airtight seal so it’s possible that the ice could go to a liquid stage while being heated. However, because of Mars low surface pressure, the boiling point of water on Mars is 4 Celsius.
Now that they know the ice is there, the scientists want to know more about the soil and why it seems to have a sticky, clumpy consistency. “Knowing that this is ice here, it allows you to speculate there are certain salts that mixed with ice can melt at low temperatures” said Smith. It’s very tempting to get a sample of this into MECA as soon as we can. Right now we have some speculations but no real interpretations available yet. I truly believe we will have answers for you by the end of the summer and hopefully earlier, so stick with us.”

The robotic arm is now digging in a new area in the trench called Snow White. They’ve dug a double trench and have hit a hard layer of ice. The team will try other techniques to see how hard the ice is, and how deep it goes, and try to dig down deeper. They will take their time, however, to make sure the sequences they use for the scraper and rasper work correctly (so as not to repeat having delays similar to what happened the first time they tried getting the soil into TEGA.)

Project manager Barry Goldman also said that the problem with Phoenix’s memory is understood, and two software patches being created to solve the problem of that used up all the space on Phoenix’s version of a flash drive.

Source: Phoenix Press Conference

Phoenix scientists have been keeping an eye on the white material uncovered in a trench dug by the lander’s scoop. Dice-size nuggets of the bright material have vanished, convincing scientists the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it. The image here is a “movie” showing the material disappearing after four days. “It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

The chunks were found at the bottom of a trench informally called “Dodo-Goldilocks” when Phoenix’s Robotic Arm enlarged that trench on June 15, during the 20th Martian day, or sol, since landing. Several were gone when Phoenix looked at the trench early today, on Sol 24.

“We know the ice is H2O but that doesn’t tell us much,” Smith said. “It is the impurities in the ice and the soil above the ice that tell us the history and if it is a habitable environment. We’ll now proceed to get the secrets out of the ice and use our instruments.”

Also on Thursday engineers said while digging in a different trench, the Robotic Arm connected with a hard surface that has scientists excited about the prospect of next uncovering an icy layer. Ray Arvidson, co-investigator for the robotic arm, said the hard layer was at the same depth as the ice layer in our the Dodo-Goldilocks trench.

The new trench, called “Snow White 2” trench, is in the middle of a polygon at the “Wonderland” site. While digging, the Robotic Arm came upon a firm layer, and after three attempts to dig further, the arm went into a holding position. Such an action is expected when the Robotic Arm comes upon a hard surface.

The Phoenix science team spent also Thursday analyzing new images and data successfully returned from the lander earlier in the day.

Meanwhile, Phoenix apparently suffered a problem with its flash memory on Tuesday, similar to, but not as serious as the problem that the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover encountered about 20 days after it landed on Mars back in 2004. The spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver is preparing a software patch to send to Phoenix so scientific data can again be saved onboard overnight when needed. Because of a large amount a duplicative file-maintenance data generated by the spacecraft Tuesday, the team is taking the precaution of not storing science data in Phoenix’s flash memory, and instead downlinking it at the end of every day, until the conditions that produced those duplicative data files are corrected.

“We now understand what happened, and we can fix it with a software patch,” said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. “Our three-month schedule has 30 days of margin for contingencies like this, and we have used only one contingency day out of 24 sols. The mission is well ahead of schedule. We are making excellent progress toward full mission success.”

The Phoenix team will hold a press conference today (Friday) at 1:00 pm EST to discuss the latest findings.

Sources: Phoenix News
The Tucson Citizen

The Phoenix lander began digging in an area called “Wonderland” early Tuesday, taking its first scoop of soil from a polygonal surface feature within the “national park” region that mission scientists have been preserving for science. The lander’s Robotic Arm created the new test trench called “Snow White” on June 17, the 22nd Martian day, or sol that Phoenix has been on the Red Planet. However, all of the newly planned science activities will resume no earlier than Sol 24 as engineers look into how the spacecraft is handling larger than expected amounts of data.

During Tuesday’s dig, the arm didn’t reach the hard white material, possibly ice, which Phoenix exposed previously in the first trench it dug into the Martian soil. This trench was only 2 centimeters deep, and the previous trench (the Goldilocks-Dodo Trench) was about 5 cm deep.

So, scientists weren’t surprised at this, and in fact, finding no ice is what they expected and wanted. The Snow White trench is near the center of a relatively flat hummock, or polygon, named “Cheshire Cat,” where scientists predict there will be more soil layers or thicker soil above possible white material.

The Phoenix team plans at least one more day of digging deeper into the Snow White trench. They will study soil structure in the Snow White trench to decide at what depths they will collect samples from a future trench planned for the center of the polygon.

Meanwhile, the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) instrument continues its ongoing experiment in the first of its eight ovens, and the science team hasn’t yet released any data on the “cooking” at higher temperatures.

TEGA has eight separate tiny ovens to bake and sniff the soil to look for volatile ingredients, such as water. The baking is performed at three different temperature ranges. At the first two temperature ranges, TEGA didn’t detect any water molecules or organics in the soil.

News Source: Phoenix News