Wow, it’s been a while! Just got back from a glorious trip through Portugal and Spain, which included narrowly avoiding a street brawl in Portugal (and I thought the English were mad about their footie!), cruising through the gorgeous waters of the Atlantic, and eating bread and cheese for lunch every day – the backpacker staples.
Anyway, things on Mars continue to go pretty well. The first soil sample is currently being processed by the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, I believe, and results should are forthcoming. In the meantime, however, Phoenix has snapped the highest resolution photos ever of Mars soil:
(Scale bar is 1mm.)
As cool as this is, it lacks a bit of “wow” factor. Many of the scientists’ quotes I’ve been seeing are about how great it is to see these tiny particles and that the green ones might be this mineral and the black ones might be that mineral. This is important contextualizing work, and interesting in its own right (arguably), but it’s a tough sell for the public. We’ve seen soil on Mars before, and the soil from the 1970s looks a whole lot like the soil from 2008. In order to really make a splash in a public relations sense, Phoenix needs more than great images of soil grains – it needs proof of water, and hopefully more. NASA has built a certain level of expectations to sell the mission to the public, and now it must live up to them. Fortunately, that should happen soon. After the soil is analyzed, the goal is to test the white material that is mixed with the soil; it is believed and unabashedly hoped that this is ice.
One other thought. When the robotic arm was delivering the soil sample to the instrument, engineers found that it clumped together, making it difficult to deliver appropriate doses. To solve this issue, they determined that they could use the grinder part of the arm’s “claw” (the bit that is needed to churn through the hardened ice) to shake the clumps apart and gently sift soil into the instrument.
These effervescent blips of creativity and innovative thinking happen in labs every day, but there’s also a rich history of resourcefulness in space exploration, where there is no rescue system, no technician to call, no back-up units. There’s the infamous square peg in a round hole life-saver from Apollo 13 and the wheel-spin maneuver from the MERs to dig an impromptu trench. Success is determined, it seems, not just by what equipment you fly, but how efficiently and comprehensively you can use it.
Add to that the recent shuttle mission to redeploy solar panels on the ISS. In a completely unrehearsed spacewalk, an astronaut rode out to the ends of the solar panels to repair torn sections with improvised ‘cufflinks’. I thought that was very impressive.
OK, what you’re saying is that we’ve found dirt on Mars, and we’re looking for water. Is the whole point of this mission is to find out if there is mud on Mars?
Aren’t you worried about Phoenix being attacked by a Maritan hippo?
I can see why these pictures are a tough sell for the public: they hardly tell us anything! I study this stuff (on Earth of course) and I’m not even sold. ‘Pictures’ using an atomic force microscope (AFM) with a resolution on the nm scale, which they supposedly have on board, won’t be able to tell us much of anything really either (besides the obligatory press releases saying that Martian particles have been imaged at the highest resolution to-date). The chemical analyses are where it’s at, and until we have some real data to work with instead of these photos, the public (and other scientists) will still be a bit impatient. Gimme some chemistry!