Fact Sheet
Digging In
A scoop prepares to dump Martain soil into a small chemical laboratory about the Phoenix lander. The laboratory is designed to detect water and organic compounds, which are the chemical building blocks of life. Although the scoop later successfully delivered its payload, the soil was so clumpy that none of it entered the experiment chamber. Engineers plan to use a "shaker" on top of the experiment to sift the soil the way a flour sifter blocks big clumps and allows smaller particles to pass through. [NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona]
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