(Music throughout) SAM is
an analytical chemistry suite on board the Curiosity rover.
We built it here at Goddard
And it's intended to really assess the habitability of Mars.
We landed near the edge of the mountain, and we've driven about 25 kilometers
coming around and slowly climbing up the mountain over the past ten years.
Sam lives inside of the Curiosity body.
It's about the size of a microwave, so it's not very big,
but it's one of the most complicated instruments
NASA's ever built or sent to another planet.
It has an entire chemistry lab squished down into this tiny little microwave box.
We find organics all over the place now.
So we've put out some discoveries that show some relatively heavy organics
that are these precursor molecules
You need to get to the more complex things that we form before you get to life.
So that's really unexpected because Mars is a very harsh environment.
So we didn't expect to find these kind of organics still intact.
So when we built SAM, we built two of them.
One of them would go to Mars and the other one would stay here on Earth.
And so what we have here is the SAM Test Bed,
which is an exact working copy of the instrument that's on Mars.
We test out everything we're going to send to Mars on the test bed beforehand.
Hopefully we'll be doing this video again in ten years for the SAM 20th year
anniversary.
We could find many years even after SAM on Mars
is not working to help interpret the data that we've been collecting.
So there will be a very long future of trying to analyze
and look at all the data we've collected over the past ten years.