The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 17, 2008

Official News page 7


REAL LIFE NEWS: A SPECK OF MARTIAN DUST

by Hazed

The Phoenix Lander which has been sitting at Mars' north pole examining its surroundings for the past few months has sent back the first-ever image of a speck of Martian dust. The picture was taken through an atomic force microscope and it shows the red dust speck at a higher magnification than anything ever seen from another planet. It's just one micrometer across (that's one millionth of a meter) and is representative of the dust that cloaks the planet, which makes the soil red and colors the sky pink.

While this picture doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know, it confirms predictions which scientists had made based on the colors seen in sunsets on Mars. It's also proof of the potential of the Phoenix Lander's optical atomic force microscope, which maps particles in 3D and can detail shapes as small as one thousandth of the width of a human hair. Now Phoenix can start taking images and measurements which will add a new dimension to information generated by the other instruments on the lander.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page