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After a week of baby steps, the UA-led Phoenix Mars lander is hitting full stride as it prepares to determine whether water lies beneath the planet's northern arctic region.

Over the weekend, the lander's robotic arm reached out and touched soil for the first time, later scooping up dirt and providing scientists with an up-close view of what could be either salt or ice embedded in the terrain.

While the lander's activities during the past week might have appeared tedious at times, the steps were taken so researchers would be sure Phoenix was ready to start looking for signs of water on Mars.

With the robotic arm working and a potential problem with one of the lander's experiments fixed, the spacecraft is ready to dig in — literally.

"I don't think we need to do any more testing," said Ray Arvidson, a lead scientist for Phoenix's robotic arm. "We're pretty excited to get on with this business here."

Phoenix, a $420 million NASA endeavor to Mars, traveled 422 million miles over 10 months before landing on May 25. The University of Arizona is leading the day-to-day scientific mission, becoming the first public university to lead a NASA mission to Mars.

As early as today, Phoenix's arm could dig up a soil sample and put the material in one of the lander's on-board experiment bays, helping scientist determine exactly what's in the soil.

A full test will take several days to complete and possibly even longer to analyze, but the hope is that the sample will contain ice or evidence that water once was in the soil but has evaporated, said Peter Smith, the UA's lead scientist for the mission.

On Sunday, the robotic arm dug down a few centimeters and took in a sample of red, claylike soil that was photographed and then dumped nearby.

The soil contained a small streak of white that could possibly be salt or ice, said Pat Woida, a lead engineer of the mission who works at the University of Arizona.

The test digging was designed to make sure the robotic arm functioned and would dig where mission planners wanted it to, said Arvidson, a professor from Washington University of St. Louis.

With the testing completed, the robotic arm is scheduled to dig three small trenches, with the collected soil providing the first experiment samples.

The first sample likely will go to the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, which is now working, Smith said.

A malfunction in a part of the instrument had sidelined TEGA for several days, causing mission planners to schedule the first series of tests with a different experiment.

But scientists and engineers have figured out a way to use a backup component, which should allow the instrument to function as it was intended, Smith said.