TEGA - Round 2 |
TEGA - Round 2 |
Jul 19 2008, 12:04 PM
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#1
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14433 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
I challenge you not to look at this and make a ping/spring/boing happy sort of a noise.
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_14223.jpg |
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Oct 19 2008, 02:50 AM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 214 Joined: 30-December 05 Member No.: 628 |
I am still trying to figure out what kind of ex-ante design would have been sufficiently robust, in line with otherdoug's contention that it should have been able to deal with a wider range of unknown sample properties. MSL will be able to zap rocks with its laser and sniff the vapors, eliminating all those transportation and deposition headaches. This could probably have worked with ice too, but the power needs may exceed what solar alone can supply. Or the deliveries could have initially been made into to a "coffee grinder" to pulverize and homogenize the contents before passing them on to the ovens. Then how to clean up the grinder to avoid cross-contamination of samples? Would one of these solutions, or the many other alternatives that have been proposed stand out enough to have been an obvious choice prior to the mission? I doubt it. But use of the word "failure" just refers to the fact that at the end of the mission we probably won't have answers about the isotopic composition of the water ice and what is dissolved in it. It does not require pinning blame on anyone, and should not be taken that way, (OK - except for the case of the doors not opening properly). Most aspects of the mission have been hugely successful.
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Oct 19 2008, 02:11 PM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 293 Joined: 22-September 08 From: Spain Member No.: 4350 |
I am still trying to figure out what kind of ex-ante design would have been sufficiently robust An auger that went through the sample into the oven, maybe. I'm not an engineer. If the ice table is interacting everyday with the atmosphere, is there much else expected to be found in the ice than in the soil on it? |
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Oct 19 2008, 03:23 PM
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#4
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2173 Joined: 28-December 04 From: Florida, USA Member No.: 132 |
...is there much else expected to be found in the ice than in the soil on it? The big hope was to analyze the water molecules themselves (and the soil contains little or no water), specifically the Deuterium/Hydrogen ratio. By the way, I see in this paper that TEGA was also to measure D/H values in the Martian atmosphere but don't recall hearing anything about this as far as the actual mission is concerned. D/H FRACTIONATION IN THE ATMOSPHERE-GROUND ICE SYSTEMON MARS "The main objective for this work is to investigate the solid-vapor fractionation processes of Deuterium/Hydrogen (D/H) in the ground ice- atmosphere system on Mars.... ...Investigating the stable isotope ratios in water vapor and ice (e.g. in the Greenland ice cores) have proved to be a valuable method for understanding the past climate on Earth.... ...With its mass spectrometer, the TEGA instrument will measure D/H values in the atmosphere and in the Martian subsurface." |
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Oct 19 2008, 10:13 PM
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#5
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Member Group: Members Posts: 293 Joined: 22-September 08 From: Spain Member No.: 4350 |
and the soil contains little or no water It didn't before winter, but now there's frost over it. If they could analyze a good bit of frost, the ratios could be meaningful if that's the same water they are scraping from the ice table. They won't need to use the rasp with the frost, so the scoop won't get warm. |
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