NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has taken the first-ever image of a single particle of Mars' ubiquitous dust, using its atomic force microscope. The photo to the left is a 3-D view of a digital elevation map of a sample collected by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Atomic Force Microscope. A Martian particle -- only one micrometer across -- is held in the left pit.
The particle is a rounded particle about one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across. 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.
It took roughly a dozen years to develop the device that is operating in a polar region on a planet now about 350 million kilometers away.
The atomic force microscope maps the shape of particles in three dimensions by scanning them with a sharp tip at the end of a spring. During the scan, invisibly fine particles are held by a series of pits etched into a substrate microfabricated from a silicon wafer.
The atomic force microscope can detail the shapes of particles as small as about 100 nm. That is about 100 times greater magnification than seen with Phoenix's optical microscope, which made its first images of Martian soil about two months ago. Until now, Phoenix's optical microscope held the record for producing the most highly magnified images to come from another planet.
Mars' ultra-fine dust is the medium that actively links gases in the Martian atmosphere to processes in Martian soil, so it is critically important to understanding Mars' environment, the researchers said.
The particle seen in the atomic force microscope image was part of a sample scooped by the robotic arm from the "Snow White" trench and delivered to Phoenix's microscope station in early July. The microscope station includes the optical microscope, the atomic force microscope and the sample delivery wheel. It is part of a suite of tools called Phoenix's Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer.
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