Lauren Mc Keown of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said, “I love DUSTIE. It’s historic; the wine barrel-size chamber was used to test a prototype of a rasping tool designed for NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander. The tool was used to break water ice, which the spacecraft scooped up and analyzed near the planet’s north pole.”

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recreated spider-like araneiform terrain, a geologic formation found on Mars, in a lab on Earth.