Continuing Astrobiology Magazine's series of articles (and this board's series of corresponding threads, here is the article on the SAM instrument package.

There's been less information on this instrument on the web so far, compared to the others, (there's no website for SAM that I know) so some of this I hadn't seen before. One interesting factoid is that the package can analyze 84 samples. That beats the couple of dozen RAT scratches of MER!

The article also has some more discussion of Chemin.

There's also a jpeg of the instrument package here. There's a prize for anyone who can explain all the abbreviations.

I hope Pete Theisinger can squeeze it all into the MSL bus!

Edit to add: You can read a 4 page pdf description of SAM from 2003 here.

Do I get a prize for decoding TLS as the Tunable Laser Spectrometer and for giving the link to its details here?

"LDMS" is the Laser Desorption Mass Spectrometer.

By the way, the SAM package weighs over 30 kg -- almost half of the total experiment mass of MSL. It is definitely the centerpiece of this mission.

Granted 84 sounds a lot in comparison, but it's less than one sample per week over the course of the 680-something sols of the MSL's primary mission; and that 84 has to last not just the primary mission but however long any extended mission goes on for. Be a pity if the site they chose turned out to be like Gusev (it took until the extended mission before they got to the really interesting places) only to have SAM run out of those little cups just when they did get to those interesting places.

84 highly accurate analyses on composition is a lot, because it's going to be used for indepth study of samples that were allready found interesting by the chemcam. I myself also feel that more capacity would be better, but it's probably allready pushed to it's limit given the mass of the device.

Yes, but with Chemcam, how are we going to differentiate between the rock itself and the weathering "rind" found on most rocks?

Will MSL have anything like the RAT's brush, that can be used to brush off overlying dust and crust-like coverings so we can actually see the composition of the rock without contamination from dust and crust covers? I understand that its laser will vaporize a very small amount of material -- but won't most of that material be the rock's surficial layer, which (as we've found out on Pathfinder and the MERs) usually is rather different in composition from the rock itself?

-the other Doug