Mars dirt fails to reach lander's testing oven

Mars dirt fails to reach lander's testing oven

www.cnn.com

The first sample of Martian dirt dumped onto the opening of the Phoenix lander's tiny testing oven failed to reach the instrument, and scientists said Saturday that they will devote a few days to trying to determine the cause.

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420 million dollars later, and the lander cannot complete it's first task of hitting the hole and sampling the dirt. Sigh.....

www.cnn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Well they can't get everything right I suppose, pretty good job up to this point though - if that oven is out of action they still got the other 7, thats a lot of redundancy, hope things work out for them.

Haha, great post x) I love the comedy in an object costing so much money and manpower fail at first attemp

I will now return to the sandbox and watch the kids move dirt from a pile into a hole by the help of a two levered digging toy..... /sarcasm

Its a problem of common sense. These NASA lab nerds have never touched a clump of dirt in their lives. They said next time they'll shake the robotic arm so that loose dirt falls into the oven instead of trying to shove the whole clump of dirt in. DUH.

I hope for the taxpayers sake they get some people who actuallty get their hands dirty to consult with before they wreck this whole experiment.

reply to post by space cadet


They hit the hole (you can see here that they did), the problem is that nothing passed the screen that was put to let only particles with less than 1 millimetre in the oven (bigger particles could block the way to the oven), probably because the Mars soil is more "sticky" than expected by those who built the system.

I always said that Mars soil (although I do not like to use the word soil, soil is supposed to be a mix of inorganic and organic matter, and I do not know yet if this is the case) looks like Portland cement, and the photos from the area from where they got the samples and the photos that show the samples on the "shovel" show that not only it is extremely fine (like Portland cement) but it also tends to keep in clumps, and that is probably one of the reasons it did not passed the screen.

One thing that I remembered while writing this is that maybe another thing is keeping the soil from passing the screen is the lower gravity on Mars, this may have worked on Earth with similar soil.

1 millimetre? may be 0.1 ?

reply to post by extrasense


1 millimetre, as you can see.

Images taken Friday show soil resting on the screen over an open sample-delivery door of Phoenix's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, an instrument for identifying some key ingredients. The screen is designed to let through particles up to one-millimeter (0.04 inch) across while keeping out larger particles, in order to prevent clogging a funnel pathway to a tiny oven inside. An infrared beam crossing the pathway checks whether particles are entering the instrument and breaking the beam.

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