Heating Martian sand grains

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has sampled the soil and heated the specimens in order to release gasses. Heating fine-grained samples in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument has released water vapor, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and sulfur dioxide.

SAM has three instruments for analyzing gas from samples heated to different temperatures: a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS), a gas chromatograph (GC), and a tunable laser spectrometer (TLS). Together, they are capable of obtaining the composition of gases; identifying different isotopes of lighter elements; and detecting organic, or carbon-containing, materials if present.