1 00:00:06,406 --> 00:00:07,007 (Music throughout) SAM is 2 00:00:07,007 --> 00:00:09,976 an analytical chemistry suite on board the Curiosity rover. 3 00:00:10,977 --> 00:00:12,178 We built it here at Goddard 4 00:00:12,178 --> 00:00:14,948 And it's intended to really assess the habitability of Mars. 5 00:00:15,248 --> 00:00:19,019 We landed near the edge of the mountain, and we've driven about 25 kilometers 6 00:00:19,119 --> 00:00:22,489 coming around and slowly climbing up the mountain over the past ten years. 7 00:00:22,555 --> 00:00:25,225 Sam lives inside of the Curiosity body. 8 00:00:25,291 --> 00:00:28,661 It's about the size of a microwave, so it's not very big, 9 00:00:29,062 --> 00:00:30,597 but it's one of the most complicated instruments 10 00:00:30,597 --> 00:00:32,632 NASA's ever built or sent to another planet. 11 00:00:32,699 --> 00:00:37,270 It has an entire chemistry lab squished down into this tiny little microwave box. 12 00:00:37,303 --> 00:00:39,706 We find organics all over the place now. 13 00:00:39,706 --> 00:00:43,243 So we've put out some discoveries that show some relatively heavy organics 14 00:00:43,510 --> 00:00:45,278 that are these precursor molecules 15 00:00:45,278 --> 00:00:49,115 You need to get to the more complex things that we form before you get to life. 16 00:00:49,115 --> 00:00:53,119 So that's really unexpected because Mars is a very harsh environment. 17 00:00:53,119 --> 00:00:55,889 So we didn't expect to find these kind of organics still intact. 18 00:00:55,922 --> 00:00:57,957 So when we built SAM, we built two of them. 19 00:00:57,991 --> 00:01:01,061 One of them would go to Mars and the other one would stay here on Earth. 20 00:01:01,061 --> 00:01:03,430 And so what we have here is the SAM Test Bed, 21 00:01:03,930 --> 00:01:07,300 which is an exact working copy of the instrument that's on Mars. 22 00:01:07,367 --> 00:01:12,072 We test out everything we're going to send to Mars on the test bed beforehand. 23 00:01:12,739 --> 00:01:15,909 Hopefully we'll be doing this video again in ten years for the SAM 20th year 24 00:01:16,176 --> 00:01:16,776 anniversary. 25 00:01:16,776 --> 00:01:18,912 We could find many years even after SAM on Mars 26 00:01:18,912 --> 00:01:21,514 is not working to help interpret the data that we've been collecting. 27 00:01:21,514 --> 00:01:24,184 So there will be a very long future of trying to analyze 28 00:01:24,184 --> 00:01:26,853 and look at all the data we've collected over the past ten years.