Atomic Force Microscope

Help me understand. What is it about this apparatus that stops the Pheonix team from using it? Before the landing the team was hyping the AFM. Now it is a forgotten item. I was really curious to see what such an image would look like. Perhaps they never practiced using it before launch? Has anyone heard that it has malfunctioned?

Positron>>>

I too was wondering about the AFM and wanted to see the Mars images we were promised. The 'regular' microscopic images that were first taken last month is all we have seen, and not much to digest there.

Yeah, I am way impressed...NOT!

yt
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It is wonder anything works, after sitting on the shelf for 7 years.

I say:

Dig more - take pictures.

Turn over intertesting rocks - take pictures.

Do what works!

I remember; the landing of this probe was the big challenge. And yes, it was. Now, the landing was fine, ... and what's next ??

Agree es, take more pictures if the instruments fail to work. We've seen some spectacular images already that rise questions; is it fossils there? But the word "fossil" is a "hush!" word for the big guys I assume.

http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001542/

First Atomic Force Microscope Image from Mars.

Hort

That's a calibration image from Mars, its true. But of what Earth substrate? I was hoping for an image of some of the specks on the first OM image.

But the AFM works!! Am looking forward to seeing something other than calibration images soon but I remember that there are still no raw OM images published.

I live in hope

Winston

I'm sure they're trying to cope with the very well organized large objects in the soil, as well as the problem of clumping.
I'm not sure just how damaging large items are to the AFM lever neddle, but it sure could be a way back to the news headlines, if the results are successful. Those questionable complex 3D 'crystal' shapes are quite large. Far too large for the AFM scanning.
From the 10th of July.
.
A side step to a more current rover concept, which looks like it could take on Mars with balloon tires fitted.

sol 51 OM of soil near AFM cantilever:

YAY! OM - soup for you! AFM - soup for you!

More soup please.

Hort

Looks like they've got an excellent sample. No clumping, good separation of the particles and what looks like reasonable resolution. I hope the other samples are like this one. Then we could be fairly confident that the AFM samples should be good also. Of course all this is provided that the original sampling of the soil is representative of the venue with respect to the depth of soil sampled and its position re. the ice layer and the presence of any voids in the soil.

Looking forward to the release of the the other raw samples and information on how they can be processed into rgb images.

Winston

Hort

The OM image you posted above was very intruiging and I tried to sharpen and magnify some of the spots that appeared intruiging (to me).

I found the original, scaled it up by X2, selected some interesting spots in it, scaled those up by another X2, converted the image to RGB, unsharp masked the spots and combined them all into one image.

I do'nt normally magnify images by more than x1.5 but I thought I would this in this case to try to show what I was seeing in the spots using a 3X magnifying glass at the original magnification of the image. The result is not too far off what the spots appeared to look like under the magnifying glass.

Here's the resultant image:

The spots look like clumps of very fine particles bonded loosely together. I wonder what the AFM images of spots like these will show?

I'll try to get a fairly accurate estimate of these spots and the objects in them but roughly they look as if they could be in the 50 uM range or smaller.

Disclaimer. All the above may be just pixellation but is posted fwiw.

Winston

Er, after rereading the verbage accompanying the image on the UA site, I am not confident this is is NOT a "before sample" image -- in which case I have no idea what we are seeing.

The text accompanying the image:

The Optical Microscope on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, a component of the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA), acquired this image of its sample stage at 15:07:42 local Mars solar time at the Phoenix site on the mission's Martian day, or Sol, 51. The rotational (substrate selection) position of the stage was 49011 and its translation (focus) position was 23771. The sample illumination configuration was blue. Images are acquired both before and after sample deposition, and these should be compared to eliminate features that may have come from non-Martian sources.

SO, All that stuff may be non-Martian -- Picante sauce imported all the way from New York City? ( Get a rope.)

Not a clue.

Hort

Yes! The description does make it unclear as to what the sol 51 image represents.

But why, after not posting the OM's which they reportedly made several weeks ago and were merely annotating and captioning, would they post a new one, un captioned and un annotated, of a control before-sample deposition image?

Why not wait and then post the before and after images at the same time.

Where are the missing OMs? Hope you did'nt scare them into posting the sol 51 image prematurely.

Also, if the sol 51 image is supposed to be of a pre-sampling control it sure looks dirty and fairly well populated? Was it contaminated from Earth or Mars? Did the inaccurate dumping of soil contaminate it? Is there another glitch here?

Winston

After looking at the sol 52 OMs, I am guessing that all the "before" exposures may have been done on Earth after the instruments were assembled.

So the bigger "stuff" in the reply 8 image is probably real, genuine soil made on Mars by union carrying Martians. ( OK, maybe it's just the result of boring, ordanary, planetary processes going on for billions and billions of years...)

If not, and this is a "before" image, then Earth technicians handling the sample wheel should all be fired -- or at least asked to shower once and a while.

And here Mars on Earth like areas we find minute fossils that track when water finally left, hopefully we will find that patch on Mars where water and life once existed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7519614.stm

Well I was travelling for over a week and I check the usual sites and....still no AFM images. A picture of some alleged "substrate" and something else unexplained. But lots of dust scraping still going on.
The Phoenix team is always ...Ready...Aim...Aim...Aim...Aim...Ready....