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kleinbl00  ·  1560 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: NASA's Mars Lander 'Mole' Is Digging Again as Marsquake Mystery Baffles Scientists

LOL they think martian soil is adobe. Because why wouldn't it be. You can do that with "dirt" all over the American Southwest because it's volcanic.

    The engineers believe that the iron oxide, which gives Martian soil its signature reddish hue, acts as a binding agent. They investigated the simulant's structure with various scanning tools and found that the tiny iron particles coat the simulant's bigger rocky basalt particles. The iron particles have clean, flat facets that easily bind to one another under pressure.

That's gonna respond real well to shear and lateral compression.

I keep thinking back to the power profile of that little thing - it's not even a cordless screwdriver. It's like an electric toothbrush. That is somehow supposed to drive itself through sixteen feet of dirt. And NASA people are generally smart so I keep wondering what the fuck I'm missing.

Here it is working.