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scoops and dumps

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Written by staff writer

Thursday, 05 June 2008

On June 2, NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft lifted its first scoop of Martian soil as a test of the lander’s Robotic Arm, according to a recent NASA release.

The practice scoop was emptied onto a designated dump area on the ground, but the Phoenix team plans to have the arm deliver its next scoopful to an instrument that heats and sniffs the sample to identify ingredients.

A glint of bright material was seen in the preliminary scoops. “That bright material might be ice or salt. We’re eager to do testing of the next three surface samples collected nearby to learn more about it,” said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Phoenix co-investigator for the Robotic Arm.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona with project management by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., 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.

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