NASA's Phoenix Lander Has an Oven Full of Martian Soil

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Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Sara Hammond 520-626-1974
University of Arizona, Tucson
shammond@lpl.arizona.edu

NEWS RELEASE: 2008-104 June 11, 2008

NASA's Phoenix Lander Has an Oven Full of Martian Soil

TUCSON, Ariz. - NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has filled its first oven with Martian soil.

"We have an oven full," Phoenix co-investigator Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson,
said today. "It took 10 seconds to fill the oven. The ground moved."

Boynton leads the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument, or TEGA, for Phoenix.
The instrument has eight separate tiny ovens to bake and sniff the soil to assess its volatile
ingredients, such as water.

The lander's Robotic Arm delivered a partial scoopful of clumpy soil from a trench informally called
"Baby Bear" to the number 4 oven on TEGA last Friday, June 6, which was 12 days after landing.

A screen covers each of TEGA's eight ovens. The screen is to prevent larger bits of soil from
clogging the narrow port to each oven so that fine particles fill the oven cavity, which is no wider
than a pencil lead. Each TEGA chute also has a whirligig mechanism that vibrates the screen to help
shake small particles through.

Only a few particles got through when the screen on oven number 4 was vibrated on June 6, 8 and 9.

Boynton said that the oven might have filled because of the cumulative effects of all the vibrating, or
because of changes in the soil's cohesiveness as it sat for days on the top of the screen.

"There's something very unusual about this soil, from a place on Mars we've never been before," said
Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "We're interested in learning
what sort of chemical and mineral activity has caused the particles to clump and stick together."

Plans prepared by the Phoenix team for the lander's activities on Thursday, June 12 include sprinkling
Martian soil on the delivery port for the spacecraft's Optical Microscope and taking additional
portions of a high-resolution color panorama of the lander's surroundings.

The Phoenix mission is led by Smith with project management at JPL and development partnership at
Lockheed Martin, located in Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space
Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus,
Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

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