In their quest to master the art of remotely scooping soil with a robotic shovel, mission controllers for NASA's Phoenix lander have decided to practice digging holes on Mars for an extra day instead of moving on to collect the soil for analysis.
Phoenix began to dig into the soil in the planet's north polar region on Sunday and was due to start collecting soil samples for study on Wednesday.
But now mission leaders have decided to postpone the schedule by a day, performing another test scoop on Wednesday and delivering its first shovelful of Martian dirt to the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) on Thursday.
TEGA is responsible for determining the composition of the Martian soil. It has eight slots for samples, each one precious because it can only be used once.
"When we deliver our first sample to TEGA, we want to be absolutely sure that we have what we want and deliver it properly," chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Smith likened the process of commanding the lander from 275 million kilometres away to teaching someone how to tie their shoes over the telephone.
"It's really tricky because you have to give them all the steps and you can't quite tell what they're doing," he said. "We tell the arm what it needs to think about and where the surface is and what motor motion it has to do to get there, but it's only six or eight hours later that we see what it's done."
Mars Rovers – Mars is full of surprises; learn more in our continually updated special report.
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10:45 10 October 2008
