The Scientists working on Phoenix Mars Lander were elated when the scoop on the end of the Mars Lander's robotic arm successfully shook a small sample onto the Lander’s surface on Monday, overcoming the problem of soil clumps that has held up the first scientific samplings for days.

The robotic arm's scoop failed to put the whole load of soil onto one of the ovens on Friday. The scientists concluded that problem was caused because the soil got bunched up on the mesh, like a load of lumpy flour sitting on a screen.  

On Monday, the mission scientist William Boynton of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is in charge of the oven experiment, said, "This soil is very cohesive and it's very hard for it to get through the screen."

On Monday, the mission team tried a different method that was worked out months ago by the members in charge of the Lander’s robotic arm and microscope. The team turned on a motorized rasp at the back of the scoop, and jiggled the scoop enough to shake about a tablespoon of the soil off the scoop's edge. The rasp will be used later in the mission to scrape up ice samples around the landing site in Mars' North Polar Region.

The method worked. The photographs sent back by the Lander showed fine particles falling onto the top surface of an instrument suite that includes the microscope. "This is good news," Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, lead scientist for the robotic arm, said Tuesday. The Phoenix team, on Tuesday, said that they were happy with the new technique that has solved their problem.

According to Phoenix team, over the next few days, they will instruct the spacecraft to sprinkle soil onto a wheel that will rotate the sample into place for viewing by an optical microscope. Soil also will be sprinkled into one of the eight ovens on the lander's Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, designed to bake Martian samples and "sniff" the gases given off; the sniffer is capable of detecting traces of organic chemicals. The future soil samples may be prepared prior to delivery by chopping and scraping them with blades on the scoop.