Ice exposed by the Mars lander

The Phoenix lander bakes a soil sample as it digs deeper into the martian surface.

One of the ovens on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander continued baking its first sample of martian soil over the weekend, while the Robotic Arm dug deeper into the soil to learn more about white material first revealed on June 3.

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The Mars lander Phoenix has finally landed on the red planet and used its robotic arm to test the soil for the building blocks of life. The 2.3m-long titanium extension will dig through the Martian topsoil and into the water-ice which lies just beneath. The next step will be to test the arm’s four joints to be sure it is in working order before digging into the soil.

After a check that tests the robotic appendage at a range of warmer and colder temperatures, a camera on the arm will be used to look under the spacecraft to assess the terrain and underside of the lander. The robotic arm will later dig into the icy layers of Mars’ northern polar region and deliver samples of soil and ice to instruments on the lander’s deck for analysis.Phoenix is set to investigate the planet’s geological history and search for the chemical building blocks which could support life. The spacecraft has also transmitted a 360-degree panorama of its frigid Martian environment.

Phoenix is an apt name for the current mission, as it rose from the ashes of two previous failures. In September 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft crashed into the red planet following a navigation error caused when technicians mixed up imperial and metric units. A few months later, another Nasa spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander was lost near the planet’s South Pole.Phoenix uses hardware from an identical twin of MPL, the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander, which was cancelled following the two consecutive failures. The probe was launched on 4 August 2007 on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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