"Scraping action produced piles of scrapings at the bottom of a trench on Monday, but did not get the material into its scoop, information returned from Mars on Monday night confirmed. The piles of scrapings produced were smaller than previous piles dug by Phoenix, which made it difficult to collect the material into the Robotic Arm scoop......It's like trying to pick up dust with a dustpan, but without a broom". Maybe they should have packed a broom? :) - Sanjeev Singh

yeah its surprising that they are having so much trouble with this - this seems like the sort of thing you could test pretty easily on earth, digging... - bob