July 01, 2008 NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander enlarged the "Snow
White" trench and scraped up little piles of icy soil on
Saturday, June 28, the 33rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
Scientists say that the scrapings are ideal for the lander's
analytical instruments. The robotic arm on Phoenix used the
blade on its scoop to make 50 scrapes in the icy layer buried
under subsurface soil. The robotic arm then heaped the scrapings
into a few 10- to 20-cubic centimeter piles, or piles each
containing between two and four teaspoonfuls. Scraping created a
grid about two millimeters deep. The scientists saw the
scrapings in Surface Stereo Imager images on Sunday, June 29,
agreed they had "almost perfect samples of the interface of ice
and soil," and commanded the robotic arm to pick up some
scrapings for instrument analysis. The scoop will sprinkle the
fairly fine-grained material first onto the Thermal and Evolved-
Gas Analyzer (TEGA). The instrument has tiny ovens to bake and
sniff the soil to assess its volatile ing