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(Music throughout) SAM is

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an analytical chemistry suite on board
the Curiosity rover.

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We built it here at Goddard

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And it's intended to really assess
the habitability of Mars.

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We landed near the edge of the mountain,
and we've driven about 25 kilometers

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coming around and slowly climbing up
the mountain over the past ten years.

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Sam lives inside of the Curiosity body.

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It's about the size of a microwave,
so it's not very big,

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but it's one of the most complicated
instruments

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NASA's ever built
or sent to another planet.

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It has an entire chemistry lab squished
down into this tiny little microwave box.

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We find organics all over the place now.

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So we've put out some discoveries
that show some relatively heavy organics

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that are these precursor molecules

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You need to get to the more complex things
that we form before you get to life.

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So that's really unexpected
because Mars is a very harsh environment.

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So we didn't expect to find these
kind of organics still intact.

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So when we built SAM,
we built two of them.

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One of them would go to Mars and
the other one would stay here on Earth.

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And so what we have here
is the SAM Test Bed,

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which is an exact working
copy of the instrument that's on Mars.

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We test out everything we're going to send
to Mars on the test bed beforehand.

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Hopefully we'll be doing this video again
in ten years for the SAM 20th year

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anniversary.

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We could find many years
even after SAM on Mars

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is not working to help interpret
the data that we've been collecting.

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So there will be a very long future
of trying to analyze

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and look at all the data we've collected
over the past ten years.