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Hi, I'm Pan Conrad, deputy principal investigator
of the SAM instrument suite on the Mars Science

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Laboratory and this is your Curiosity rover
update.

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While our robotic explorer has been busy characterizing
the surface of Mars, the SAM team has also

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been busy, but we’ve been looking at something
invisible, the Martian atmosphere.

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SAM, or Sample Analysis at Mars, is not one
instrument, but three, all of which are designed

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to work together to chemically characterize
Mars.

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SAM measures chemical elements and molecules
and we do this by looking at.

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We can bake solid samples until they give
up their volatile components or their gases

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or we can directly inhale the Martian atmosphere
through our inlet ports.

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The tunable laser spectrometer has a special
role for SAM in that it can very sensitively

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detect the organic molecule, methane, which
has been observed from the Earth telescopically

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and also by the Mars Express orbiter at very,
very low limits in the Martian atmosphere.

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We’re trying to discover whether or not
we can see this molecule from the Martian

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surface and if it has any variation from season
to season.

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So we’ve already begun prospecting for methane
and to date we don’t have a definitive detection.

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We’ll continue looking during the course
of the mission.

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In the coming months, wherever Curiosity goes
SAM will continue to sniff the Martian atmosphere

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periodically looking for changes on a seasonal
or maybe even diurnal basis and that will

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tell us something about the dynamics the exchange
between the surface and the atmosphere.