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US spacecraft takes first image of Martian dust particle

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-08-15 09:49

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has taken the first-ever image of a single particle of Mars' ubiquitous dust, using its atomic force microscope, mission scientists reported Thursday.

Particles of Martian dust lying on NASA's Phoenix Lander's Optical Microscope's silicon substrate are seen in this photo released by NASA to Reuters August 14, 2008. The Lander's robotic arm sprinkled a soil sample from the "Snow White" trench onto the microscope on July 2, 2008, the 38th day of the mission after the landing. [Agencies]

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The particle, shown at higher magnification than anything ever seen from another world, is a round 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.

"This is the first picture of a clay-sized particle on Mars, and the size agrees with predictions from the colors seen in sunsets on the Red Planet," said Phoenix co-investigator Urs Staufer from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, who leads a Swiss consortium that made the microscope.

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