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The UA-led Phoenix Mars lander delivered a soil sample to one of the spacecraft's science instruments Friday, though it's not clear whether any of the soil made it into the device.

Images from Phoenix show a pile of dirt sitting on top of the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, but the machine didn't confirm that any soil actually reached an instrument oven, according to a mission news release.

A screen with tiny openings covers each oven on TEGA, acting as a sort of sieve by filtering samples down to tiny granules that can be more easily tested.

Mission planners don't know why the sample didn't make it to the oven, but they speculate that the soil atop TEGA is clumpy, prohibiting smaller particles from getting through to the instrument.

"I think it's the cloddiness of the soil and not having enough fine granular material," Ray Arvidson, the digging czar for the mission, said in the news release.

"In the future, we may prepare the soil by pushing down on the surface with the arm before scooping up the material to break it up, then sprinkle a smaller amount over the door," said Arvidson, who is from Washington University in St. Louis.

TEGA, which was built by the University of Arizona and the University of Texas-Dallas, is designed to heat soil samples up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and detect elements that vaporize during the cooking.

By identifying the temperatures that materials burn off, scientists will get a better understanding of the soil's composition.

Before trying to push the sample through, mission planners halted activities for TEGA on Saturday while working on some other options, including using shakers on TEGA to try to bring a sample into the oven.

Instead of starting the TEGA experiment, Phoenix on Saturday was scheduled to dig a trench in the soil at the site of two practice digs that occurred earlier last week.

The lander also was scheduled to take some pictures of practice samples of the soil dug up previously to try to gain a better understanding of the soil, the news release said.

"We are hoping to learn more about the soil's physical properties at this site," Arvidson said in the release. "It may be more cohesive than what we have seen at earlier Mars landing sites."

Launched in August, Phoenix traveled 422 million miles before landing on Mars' northern arctic plains in search of signs of liquid water and whether the planet ever had a climate suitable for life.

The lander in the $420 million NASA mission touched down on Mars on May 25.