William Atkins
Sunday, 17 August 2008 21:33
Science -
Space
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NASA announced on August 15, 2008 that its Phoenix Mars Lander has imaged a single particle of Martian dust using its atomic force microscope at a “… higher magnification than anything ever seen from another world.”
The NASA/JPL news release, from Tucson, Arizona, “
Phoenix microscope takes first image of Martian dust” states that the particle is only about one micrometer in diameter, only one millionth of a meter.
The round particle, commonly called
“Sorceress” by Phoenix team members, is a common particle found on Mars. The NASA article states,
“It is a speck of the dust that cloaks Mars. Such dust particles color the Martian sky pink, feed storms that regularly envelop the planet and produce Mars’ distinctive red soil.”
“Sorceress” came from the materials scooped up by Phoenix Mars Lander from the
“Snow White” trench and dumped into the Phoenix microscope station in July 2008. The “microscope station” of the spacecraft consists of its Optical Microscope (OM), its atomic force microscope (
AFM), and the sample wheel (which delivers the samples to the OM and AFM).
The station is part of a group of tools called the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer (
MECA).
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An atomic force microscope, sometimes also called generally a scanning force microscope (SFM), is a very high-resolution type of scanning probe microscope that can take images of objects down to resolutions of fractions of one nanometer (that is, one billionth of a meter or one thousandth of a micrometer [micron]).
The optical microscope (OM) on the Phoenix spacecraft produces magnifications that are one hundred times less precise than the AFM. The OM, it was stated by the Phoneix team, had previously held the record
“for producing the most highly magnified images to come from another planet.”
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