So, what did they do about the frozen grease?

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I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

75% of the crew went for a spacewalk. Lube got cleaned up.

Spoiler: It was just an excuse to do the: Oh, no, his magnetic boots slipped and he's drifiting away! I'll use this bottle of gas for an improvised maneuvering unit and go rescue him!

===

As of this writing, still no Sol 27 Raw Images yet. (University of Arizona Phoenix Mars Mission: Lander Gallery)

===

Not fake links like others might give you. Honest links:
NASA Phoenix Mission
University of Arizona Phoenix Mars Mission
University of Arizona Phoenix Mars Mission: Lander Gallery
JPL Phoenix Mission News
NASA Phoenix Twitter Feed
NASA Phoenix Multimedia
CSA Phoenix Mars Mission
Planetary Society: Phoenix Mission
Planetary Society: Phoenix Non-SSI Raw Images
Planetary Society: Phoenix Sol-By-Sol Summary
Planetary Society: Weblog
Emily Lakdawalla Ustream video chat (sporadic)
Texas A&M University Phoenix SSI Raw Images Directory
Google Mars landing site
NASA TV (or NASA TV Yahoo! source or high-resolution)
NASA TV Media Channel

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The microscope images showed some of the soil particles are crystalline. If they are hard crystals they might have gotten within the hinges of the doors preventing them from opening fully. This might be something they can model on the ground.

Bob Clark

Anyone know what the hinges on the doors look like? Perhaps ice could have formed on them. But you would think when temperatures rose it would spring open fully.


Bob Clark

Here are some close up images of the soil still on the scoop.

Soil Scoop Zooms.
http://www.marsroverblog.com/discuss...oop-zooms.html

They definitely give the impression of dried out soil that had
recently been wet.


Bob Clark

Unfortunately, that's not an option for Phoenix.

I guess they'll have to come up with a "Plan B."

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can they use the scoop to nudge it open?

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Eagle Eye Observatory

Sol 28 Raw Images

I see no mention of what happened to Sol 27. Edit: The Texas A&M University Phoenix SSI Raw Images Directory labels Sol 27: "Exit safe mode (was: WCL test, remote sensing, hold sample for WCL)"

Sounds like Phoenix had a bit of a spell. Did the downloaded software patch happen and disagree with it? Or maybe what safed was its communcations relay.

Edit: And for whomever asked about MECA Wet, the label for Sol 28 is: "WCL test, remote sensing, hold sample for WCL".

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A lot of the Sol 28 images look repetitive, and some of them seem to be garbage images. Maybe that is the result of some sort of problem on Sol 27.

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"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

MECA Wet Chemistry Lab delivery, to one of four cells:

(Edit, 2 days later: As messy as this looks, it turned out it wasn't a delivery. It was to check the alignment of the scoop with the MECA Wet, which they subsequently tweaked. Maybe the mess is from sprinkling practice with the MECA Wet door closed.)

University of Arizona Phoenix Mars: MECA Instrument:

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The scoop grows a beard:

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What the?????

Electrostatic effect? Magnetic effect? In which case why have we not seen it before, here or elsewhere? Dirty icicles? What time of day was this image taken?

I notice that the next image of the scoop lacks them. Did they fall off, sublime, melt?

Jon

Could also be moist soil.


Bob Clark

Moist soil doesn't form tendrils like that.

Over on unmannedspaceflight someone has pointed out that the end part of the scoop is overexposed, and hard to make out, but that the soil is actually sitting in the scoop. Near the bottom of this page.

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"Many of those people are not getting four when adding two and two; many of them aren't even getting five or twenty-two. They're getting potato."
Gillianren

Yeah, you can see the over exposed parts if you look closely. I highlighted the blade and the trough

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Eagle Eye Observatory

Yeah, images posted on marsroverblog.com also make that clear:

Soil Scoop Zooms.
http://www.marsroverblog.com/dyn/ent...ussion_page/20

Bob Clark

I thought it took 4 days for TEGA to get results on a sample. It's now coming on two weeks.
Anyone know when we'll get results?


Bob Clark

From the June 11, audio conference:

Audio Recording of Phoenix Media Telecon for June 11, 2008.
"Jeremy Manier: Hi. Thanks a lot. Uh, so Bill, uh, w-what, uh, what then will be the schedule with, uh, with the TEGA now? Uh, what -- when do you expect to be, uh, seeing the first, uh, things back? And how-how long is it really -- is it really going to take to, uh, to get some first gleanings from, uh, that analysis?

"Bill Boynton: Well, we-we're hopeful that sometime in the next few days, we will close the oven and begin the analysis process. Now, the analysis process, uh, really takes about, uh, five days. We have, uh, four days of heating the samples to different temperature limits and an intervening day to, uh, actually bake out the mass spectrometer to remove any, uh, water vapor that we might have gotten from an earlier day's run.
So it's probably a weeklong process once we begin. Uh, by the end of that time, we have -- should have some preliminary ideas of what we're seeing. Uh, the instrument's really designed to get very quantitative results. And it's likely to be, uh, several weeks after that before we really have definitive, uh, scientific numbers. But we-we should have a pretty good idea somewhere on the order of a week or so after we begin."
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix...hx20080611.php

However, later on Peter Smith says the analysis will begin 2 days later which would have been June 13th. So it should be 11 days since the analysis should have begun.


Bob Clark

I had thought that rust would have taken weeks to form but after a web search I found it can occur quite rapidly in the presence of salt:

Rust.
"When in contact with water and oxygen iron will rust. If salt is present, for example, in salt water, and the metal rusts more quickly. This chemical reaction is used in the production of handwarmers[2] Iron metal is relatively unaffected by pure water or by dry oxygen."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust#Chemical_reactions

And this page says the reaction can also be accelerated by the presence of carbonic acid, expected in a CO2 atmosphere with liquid water present:

Rust and rust prevention.
http://www.sciencetechnologyaction.c...php?studyid=51

However, the amounts of oxygen, usually required for rust, are quite low in Mars atmosphere so this might limit the rate at which this can occur. The "Rust and rust prevention" page only gives examples of rust occuring in anaerobic conditions when bacteria are present.
Another possibility is that it could be corrosion due to sulfuric acid, which is expected to exist with liquid water and sulfates present:

Why is sulfuric acid more corrosive to steel than hydrochloric acid?
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_sul...rochloric_acid


Bob Clark

On the other hand ...

Jun. 24, 2008 | 10:59 PDT | 17:59 UTC
Phoenix sol 29 update: Anomalies here and there, but minimum mission success is on the horizon.
"They now think they understand the problem with the TEGA doors, that it is a mechanical problem, that an assembly "was not fabricated to flight specifications." However they still think they can get samples in, and plan to try it on sol 30 or 31."
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001521/


Bob Clark

Well, something very similar did happen on Skylab. Replace the gas bottle part with "luckily, he was still just within arms reach". Still, must have been a heart-stopping experience to be drifting away from your craft.


On topic: they're talking about shakers to get samples in. Could it be any help to use these shakers to try to shake the doors into position? I don't know the technical details of the craft, so I don't know whether something like that makes any sense.

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Doesn't seem to be a bad idea. Considering the 7 cycles of shaking that were done before, that may have had some effect on the doors of the first oven. I suppose you could try to find pictures from before the sample delivery, after sample delivery, and after the sample made it into the over, to see if there was any amount of movement on the doors.

You may need to find a picture of the doors right before the shaking started, the sample may have lost some weight due to water disappearing... which... may have continued during the shake cycles... so the pictures would not be meaningful wrt to shaking having an effect on the doors. Oh well, I tried.

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"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

Thanks. Good one. Besides the TEGA door sticking, includes answers to flash file bug, and hints of cause of Sol 27 safing. Those darn programmers!

Sounds like they think they can sneak soil in past the stuck TEGA doors -- I presume just by sprinkling into the triangular gap at the top.

And, they are just a couple of days away from the minimal mission success criterion. Quite an achievment so soon.

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NASA Phoenix Mission

Sol 29 Raw Images

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Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society Weblog: Ustream chat today 12:00 PDT / 19:00 UTC

Event starts in 15 minutes

Edit: Event archived at Webcast 6/25/08 Phoenix update and allied chat log: June 25, 2008: Ustream: Phoenix sol 30 update.

Edit: The archived chat was working, I was listening, and then it stopped -- and vanished. Be flexible. Look for it at Emily Lakdawalla's Ustream channel. Right now, it shows a broken link.

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any news to report on yet in the conference
just 1dering?
thx

Wondering? The Phoenix briefing/conference is Thursday. No briefing today.

I see above two different briefing times were given. NASA cleaned that up.
Briefing:
Thursday, June 26, 1030 PDT
Thursday, June 26, 1330 EDT
Thursday, June 26, 1730 UTC

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Sol 30 Raw Images

Surely, this is a MECA Wet delivery


This looks like a delivery to the second oven of TEGA, the one with the stuck barn doors. It's the end of a sequence that seems to show the scoop opening more and more. (Edit: Texas A&M University Phoenix SSI Raw Images Directory calls it "TEGA air delivery test".)


It's got to be a challenge: they want to deliver within 30 minutes of scooping, to keep the water ice from sublimating away, and they need to hit a small target because of the stuck doors. There's no time to stop and image the alignment's being just right before dumping.

And then, will a quick delivery of soil really matter, if the soil might only pass through the vibrating mesh, after waiting a couple of days, like with the first oven? I guess we'll see.

Edit: NASA Phoenix Mission News: NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Puts Soil in Chemistry Lab

And about TEGA:

Ah. The really ice-bearing deliveries will be aimed at the three remaining ovens with doors that probably mostly work.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the sprinkling technique that maybe will get soil through the mesh faster. I wonder what short-circuited from the vibrating on the first oven.

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Threadjack: this was the first time I heard of an incident like this. I was fascinated, and tried to find out more. But I was unsuccessfull. I did find something that sounds pretty much as what you described, but it happened on Salyut-6. Here is a Times article describing the incident. (another website talking about it is here)
Is this what you were referring to?

apologies for the threadjack.

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