Scientists have confirmed that the first sample of Martian dirt dumped onto the opening of the Phoenix lander's tiny testing oven failed to work like mommy's grown-up oven as expected causing many of the younger scientists to break down and cry.
Photos released by the University of Arizona team overseeing the mission showed a scoopful of dirt sitting on and around the open oven door after being dumped by the craft's 8-foot robot arm. But none of it made it into the tiny paper packets labeled Brownies or Chocolate Chip Cookies supplied by the oven manufacturer.
Nothing seems to be wrong with the sixty-watt bulb heat source or the dirt delivery by the lander's robot arm, said William Boynton of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is overseeing the oven experiments. The dirt landed properly and instruments show a vibrator on the screen designed to help shake soil into the packets was working.
The oven is one of eight on the craft designed to heat soil and test gasses for signs of water or Eorganic compounds that could be building blocks for life. Design cuts by NASA's Jet Propulsion lab changed original plans for custom ovens to the ready-made item available at Toys-R-Us. Hasbro the subcontractor says that it has manufactured over one million of the ovens and defends their reliability on earth. "They were designed as a toy and not for use on interplanetary space probes."
The teams overseeing the experiments plan to spend the next several days going over possible reasons for the apparent failure.
"It could be that the dirt is too dense or compacted to make it into the packets. We are going to try to use a larger size screen that will allow dirt the size of chocolate sprinkles to pass through."
