[ silence--NASA Planetary Science open ] [ silence--NASA Planetary Science open ] [ jazz music ] [ jazz music ] Chris Johnson: I'm Chris Johnson, a project engineer with the SAM team, and we're looking at the Mars--the SAM Mars chamber. SAM is on the Curiosity rover, and it's a suite of three instruments--and it has the ability to look for potential suitability for ever having past signs of life on the Martian surface. The chamber was built to simulate the environment that the SAM instrument will experience on the Martian surface. We need the Mars chamber on Earth so that we can operate the SAM testbed and run all the experiment sequences that we hope to run on the Martian surface. We're simulating extreme cold surface temperatures--Mars is much colder than Earth so we can expect to experience temperatures as cold as minus 120 degrees Celsius and as, y'know, warm as a cool summer day--around 20 degrees C. So, unlike your standard environmental test chamber or thermal vacuum chamber, this chamber is capable of actually operating in an atmosphere, so we can simulate the thin Martian carbon dioxide atmosphere. I like working on the chamber, but what's really, really great is the instrument that sits in the chamber. And I work with a fabulous team of people, so every day, we have new challenges, and that's the best part about working on the SAM chamber. [ music, beeping ] [ music, beeping fades ] [ music ] [ silence ]