There's a new Martian movie, though
it's not quite feature-length.
A series of still images taken by
the Phoenix
Mars Lander of water-ice clouds sailing overhead on the red planet has been
turned into a
short animation by NASA mission scientists.
"The images were taken as part
of a campaign to see clouds and track wind. These are clearly ice clouds,"
said Mark Lemmon of Texas
A&M University
and the lead scientist for the lander's surface
stereo imager, which snapped the pictures of the clouds during a 10-minute
period on Aug. 29. The resulting animation is just a few seconds long.
Phoenix, which landed on Mars on May 25,
has also begun to analyze a sample of Martian dirt take from the deepest trench
dug so far by the lander.
On Sunday, Phoenix's robotic arm sprinkled a small
fraction of the estimated 3 cubic inches (50 cubic centimeters) of dirt that
was scooped out of the informally-named "Stone Soup" trench on
Saturday.
The $420 million mission, which
began its 30-day extended
mission on Aug. 27, is analyzing the Martian regolith
for signs of potential past habitability.
This latest sample will be analyzed
by the lander's wet chemistry lab, which dissolves
samples in water brought from Earth to see what soluble minerals might be in
the dirt.
The Stone
Soup trench, where the sample was taken from, lies between two of the polygon-shaped
hummocks that cover the vast arctic plains where Phoenix landed. Mission
scientists are interested to see whether the material in this sample will be
different from earlier samples, which were taken from trenches near the center
of a polygon.
Images of the sample material taken
inside the scoop on Sunday showed that the dirt was clumping differently than
it had in previous samples.
"This is pretty exciting stuff
and we are anxious to find out what makes this deeper soil cloddier
than the other samples," said Doug Ming, a Phoenix
science team member from NASA's Johnson
Space Center
in Houston.
A series of images of fresh dirt dug
and discarded from Stone Soup have given the team some clues as to the
composition of the sample. Observations of the spectrum of the regolith don't show any signs of water-ice binding the
particles together, but bigger clumps of dirt have a texture that could
indicate a high concentration of salts. The wet chemistry lab would be able to
identify any soluble salts in the sample.
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