What has Sam Discovered on Mars NASA has made a potentially huge discovery on Mars via Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, NPR reported this week. SAM is the rover's on-board set of chemical analytics tools, tasked with identifying organic compounds -- the carbon-containing building blocks that are the basis for life. The public will likely have wait till early December as NASA repeats tests to conclusively confirm its still-secret findings. The news is set to be officially released at the next meeting of the American Geophysical Union, set for December 3 to 7 in San Francisco. The SAM instrument suite consists of a Gas Chromatograph (GC), a Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer (QMS), and a Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS), as well as systems that manipulate and process samples. SAM can analyze gases, either drawn directly from the atmosphere or extracted from regolith or powdered rock samples by heating or chemically treating the samples. SAM will search for and characterize organic and inorganic molecules important to life on Earth, as well as information about the chemistry of past and present Martian environments. November 23, 2012 4:00 AM PST Photo by: NASA | Caption by: James Martin  Divits in the soil surrounding NASA's Curiosity rover seen here are where the robotic arm has dug up soil for analysis that includes testing for organic compounds by SAM. The fifth scoop, in the upper middle divit, was collected on November 9. Each sample is about 2 inches wide. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Am I missing something? The first and second pictures both show the divits. My question is who took the first photo? is there a flying photocoptor that follows the rover around? The entire rover is in the shot. How does the unit take a complete photo of itself without an arm being visible reaching out of the frame of the shot? This has the feel of a faked moon mission. |
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