Baking Mars dirt
The Mars Phoenix Lander has finally managed to shake some Martial soil into its laboratory instrument. The TEGA, the laboratory instrument on the lander, has eight ovens for baking soil to analyze the ingredients. When the robotic arm scooped up soil to one of the ovens a few days ago, the soil got clogged on the screen over the oven, preventing analysis. They finally managed to unclog the soil after applying a new method of shaking the screen.
It's not known whether it was thanks to the new shaking method or whether because the soil was exposed long enough to lose its clumpiness, but the lander didn't get to waste a perfectly fine oven. Now all we have to do is wait for the lander to bake the soil and send back what it finds out about the composition. I'm hoping for some direct evidence of water, or even organic molecules, but it would be surprising if there was no indication of even any sort of mineral formed with the influence of water.
The picture of soil on top of one of the ovens on the Mars Phoenix Lander is courtesy of NASA.
[...] Having landed on Mars in May, when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to see it during its descent, the Mars Phoenix Lander surprised everyone when it managed to glimpse a patch of ice that was probably uncovered during its landing. And it didn’t take long for it to take microscopic images of Martian dust. And despite its first attempt at scooping up Martian soil for analysis having run into problems when the dirt got stuck on the instrument screen door, it eventually managed to shake it in. [...]