Mars team ponders whether lander sees ice or salt

So what stops them from putting it under microscope or into another oven to check it out??

Are the people at the controls the best or just available? They go hoping to find water and build a machine which has difficulty with anything which isn't bone dry dust.

Ill tell you what stops them, this piece of junk easy bake oven erector set on a bottle rocket! They built this thing to go to another planet to analize the soil and ice, and it cant even tell the difference between salt and ice! i could have built one of these out of popsicle sticks and rubberbands. NASA is such a lame old dinosaur, its not even funny.

Mercury 01: Be my guest! Perhaps you could also build a magic car made of cheese and fly to the moon.
The instruments used to say what is what are in the oven, not on the outside this time. There should also be no problem with samples in the future. They are now going to put new samples in using the 'salt shaker' method by titling the shovel slightly and running the rasp to slowly shake out the dirt which should deal with the clumpiness of the soil just fine.

Maybe I will!

If you do, don't forget to check for mice before you go. They can wreak havoc with hull integrity.

Yeah yeah, now NASA improvises feeding method to the oven. Make you wonder these pinnacles of human intelligence ever touched muck, dust and soil with their hand the whole life!

I saw them testing the digging arm on tv once. they were using fine beach sand.

Come on people! Science is a messy and unpredictable business with a long history of accidents, surprises and improvisation. That's how knowledge works. Deal with it. If they had known what was already there then there wouldn't be any reason to go. I'm seeing the same posters who were moaning and groaning saying the oven wasn't working and everything was lost. Yet that's been dealt with and here we are again dealing with the same silly attitude. Do any of you have a relevant degree or any experience? I'll wait to hear from an actual working (not armchair) scientist or engineer with criticism more specific than "this thing sucks!" before I take this kvetching seriously.

The sample being baked has also been sitting out in the sun before it made it in to be heated. So any lose water would have been absent. They will need to bake the minerals to see if any water is combined with the minerals.

This is slow business. You have to send a command to the lander, wait for the video to return, confirm success or not, and start the next movement. It is not in real time and it is an expensive toy with no repair shop in sight. No mistakes allowed type of stress.

Well, Im a working engineer, and If it were my toy, I wouldnt have went with that old abandoned design they used. Dont get me wrong, I know these guys could beat me at chess, but it just seems like they dont have it together in the name of the planet and the human race.

PieRSquare don't get so upset, if your machine will manage to find out whether its ice or salt before the mission is over it will still be a great success.

I reckon some aren't well fortified against criticism-whether in their opinion- constructive or not- and resort to "I show mine, show me yours" game. I'll just mention that NASA's pioneering engineering achievements in the Apollo program was what motivated me to get into engineering...but personally, NASA is not maturing as expected...

Ive just decided to stand by my opinion that this lander sucks. "NOW PLAYING: THE BEST OF NASA, 1976 EDITION" I think NASA is a front.