Posted on behalf of Katharine Sanderson

Phoenix has taken the briefest of breaks from digging up soil and scooping it into ovens, and has turned its head skywards. The result is this lovely little animation of water ice clouds floating above Mars. It’s only short, made from just ten stills, but it brings a bit more realism to this science project that can at times seem a bit abstract, going on as it is, so very, very far away.

Apart from this pause to venture into the cinematic world, the lander has been busy, yes, you guessed it, digging. This time the trench is deeper than ever before – 18 centimeters deep. Dubbed “stone soup”, the trench’s contents have been sprinkled into one of Phoenix’s ovens for analysis.

The scientists involved expect to see stronger concentrations of salts down there in the cloddy soil, which is also exciting the team because it comes from the intersection of two hummocks. Soil from the edge of one of these areas hasn’t been looked at before. It might be composed of slightly different stuff to soil from the middle of a hummock. “This is pretty exciting stuff and we are anxious to find out what makes this deeper soil cloddier than the other samples,” said Doug Ming, a Phoenix science team member from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston. We wait to see what they find.

As an aside – this is Phoenix’s second foray into cinematography. On sol 80 of the mission, Phoenix took a video of frost forming on one of its mirrors.