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[Silence, NASA Planetary Opening Animation]

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[Silence, NASA Planetary Opening Animation fades]

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[music, control room b-roll] Florence Tan: My name is Florence Tan.

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I'm the SAM Electrical Lead Engineer, but now I'm working as the, uh,

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SAM Payload Uplink Lead and the Payload Downlink Lead, supporting

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uh, operations on Mars! SAM is an instrument on

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the rover--Curiosity--it's...it's actually, I think

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of it--SAM--as a nose. You know, it's like a very sensitive nose. It can sniff out

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different Martian components. You know, air, as well as

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soil samples to really really tease out the secrets

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of Mars. The way SAM gets a sample is--first of all,

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sifted by the rover. And then, we get a tiny

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small amount--you know, a dollop--into one of our 74 cups, which is

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actually in a carousel. And then, we take the sample, and it gets

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put into an oven. When the oven gets heated up about a thousand degrees

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--and it can go as high as 1100 degrees when we run the "hot oven"

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option--and this is Celsius, you know, not your regular oven.

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And then it goes--the gas that comes out gets flown into the

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three instruments that analyze this day. SAM is

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very similar to a very well-equipped lab

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on Earth, except, you know, we're special. We're on Mars!

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You know, this is something that I

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didn't appreciate until I polled one of the scientists and asked him, you know,

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when was the last time we did a quadrupole mass spectrometer on Mars?

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And he was like, "Uh, maybe 35

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years ago," and, you know, so this is--this is really special. We've never had

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something like this. There's no comparison. SAM is working

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just so marvellously--it is, you know

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--it is beyond our dreams. This is marvelous. I just...

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can't even tell you how great it is. It's...it's great! [fade out]

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[music, beeping, Goddard End Tag]

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[music, beeping fades, Goddard End Tag]