NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has
successfully drilled into the rock-hard ice layer below the Martian surface and
collected the frozen shavings in its robotic arm scoop, NASA said on Wednesday.
The ice is too hard for Phoenix's
scoop to dig into it, so the craft used a powered rasp on the back of the scoop
to drill into the ice, loosen the material and kick it up into the scoop.
Images and data sent from Phoenix back to Earth on
Wednesday confirmed that the material
was in the scoop and showed that it had changed slightly during the hours
after it was collected.
When ice is exposed to the air on
Mars, it starts to sublimate, or convert into water vapor (whereas ice exposed
to air on Earth tends to melt).
The rasp made two
separate holes in the trench informally named Snow White, which Phoenix enlarged over the
weekend and early in the week.
This ice collection trial was a test
of the rasping method of gathering a sample. The same method will be used in
the coming days to collect a sample for Phoenix's
Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, which bakes samples in its tiny ovens and
analyzes the vapors they give off to determine the composition of the sample.
"This was a trial that went
really well," said Richard Morris, a Phoenix
science team member from NASA's Johnson
Space Center
in Houston.
"While the putative ice sublimed out of the shavings over several hours,
this shows us there will be a good chance ice will remain in a sample for
delivery" to Phoenix's ovens.
Mission scientists will command Phoenix to continue
scraping and enlarging the Snow White trench and conduct another series of rasp
tests on Wednesday.
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