Mission planners with the UA-led Phoenix Mars lander gave the spacecraft an extra day to dig around in the red planet's dirt Tuesday, after they weren't satisfied with the results of an earlier test.
The lander's robotic arm initially was scheduled to carve out a series of soil samples that would be placed in on-board experiments, but the plan changed when scientists and engineers got back pictures and data from the arm's earlier dig, said Peter Smith, the mission's lead scientist.
The robotic arm was supposed to scoop up a few centimeters of dirt and then dump it out, but researchers couldn't determine whether the procedure was successful, Smith said.
Additionally, it appears as though a clump of dirt stuck to the inside of the robotic arm's scoop only to later fall out onto Phoenix's deck.
Phoenix is a $420 million NASA project designed to search Mars' arctic region for signs of whether liquid water was ever present or if the planet ever had a climate suitable for life.
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Led by the University of Arizona, it is the first NASA Mars mission to be run by a public university.
While the act of scooping up soil might seem somewhat simple — Smith likened it to a child digging in sand at a beach — the lander executes all of its actions without any real-time control on Earth, meaning mission planners can only program a command sequence and wait to see what the lander does.
"We're doing it blind from 170 million miles away," Smith said, "so it's taking a little expertise."
With an extra day to perfect the digging, Phoenix should be ready to scoop up the first scientific samples that will be processed through a series of on-board instruments.
Another day also might help them better understand a problem shown in a picture taken of one of the lander's main experiments.
The image shows that a cover for the test bays on the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, isn't completely open.
However, the problem with the instrument shouldn't pose too much of a hazard, as the robotic arm can still deliver samples to the experiment when its door is half closed, Smith said.
Mission planners are hopeful that the malfunction was caused by frigid temperatures on Mars and that heat from the midday sun might allow the cover to open completely, Smith said.
