The Phoenix Lander has sent back the most-detailed view of the Red Planet’s soil to date.
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Not since the Viking Landers, in the 1970s, has a spacecraft scooped and tested Martian dirt to learn more about the composition of Mars, said Peter Smith, the mission’s principal investigator, in a news conference Friday.
On June 12, using an optical microscope inside one the lander’s instruments, the Phoenix science team took the highest resolution image of individual soil grains. The team can now begin to identify, in great detail, the minerals making up the north polar region of Mars.