By Xinhua,
Washington : NASA has delayed gathering of Martian soil samples by the Phoenix Mars Lander due to a communication glitch on a satellite.
The NASA Phoenix team was confident to start delivering soil samples to instruments on the Lander’s deck on Wednesday, using its robotic arm after two practice rounds of digging and dumping the clumpy soil at the Martian arctic site this week.
However, the Phoenix team learned on Wednesday that NASA’s Odyssey orbiter, which relays the lander’s data to and from Earth, had entered a “safe mode,” preventing Wednesday’s instructions from reaching the lander.
Odyssey mission managers are running a check of the orbiter to determine what triggered the safe mode. In safe mode, the spacecraft turns off non-essential operations and waits for instructions from Earth.
In the meantime, the Phoenix team started to use the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to send commands to the lander and receive data.
Odyssey has been primarily used for relay services since MRO’s radio powered off unexpectedly during a relay pass on Martian day 2. The radio has been tested repeatedly over the past week and appears to be operating well.
Before the actual gathering work that may start Thursday at the earliest, the two practice digs have already awoken scientists’ interest in some bright white material found in the Martian soil just beneath the surface.
“Two scoops into the soil we see there’s a white layer becoming visible in the wall of the trench,” said NASA’s Carol Stoker, a member of the Phoenix team.
Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith said, “We’ve had an heated discussion of whether that may be salts or ice or some other material even more exotic.”
Concentrations of salts can be indicators of previous wet conditions. One goal of the Phoenix mission is to determine whether the ice beneath the surface of far-northern Mars ever thaws during long-term climate cycles.
The location chosen for the sample is adjacent to the hole dug by the two practice scoops. The team plans to command the arm to deliver the sample to the lander’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA).
The arm has been performing flawlessly. It made daring, Tai Chior Yoga-like moves to position the Robotic Arm Camera to take pictures underneath the lander, and did its two test digs “magnificently.”
Phoenix is the first mission to dig into Mars with a robotic arm since NASA’s Viking Landers in the 1970s.