While Curiosity continues to perform groundbreaking science in Mars' Gale Crater,
NASA today announced the scientific instruments and capabilities for the next rover mission planned for 2020.
Come out into the tall grass for the details.
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According to the NASA release:
Managers made the selections out of 58 proposals received in January from researchers and engineers worldwide. Proposals received were twice the usual number submitted for instrument competitions in the recent past. This is an indicator of the extraordinary interest by the science community in the exploration of the Mars. The selected proposals have a total value of approximately $130 million for development of the instruments.
NASA is changing the focus of its scientific investigation of Mars. Goodbye, SAM. That is Curiosity's heavy, bulky and power hungry oven and complicated material handling system called the
Sample Analysis at Mars suite of instruments, hence, SAM. Instead, the new rover will carry 12 instruments, including:
Mastcam-Z, an advanced camera system with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability with the ability to zoom. The instrument also will determine mineralogy of the Martian surface and assist with rover operations. The principal investigator is James Bell, Arizona State University in Phoenix.
SuperCam, an instrument that can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis, and mineralogy. The instrument will also be able to detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks and regolith from a distance. The principal investigator is Roger Wiens, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico. This instrument also has a significant contribution from the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales,Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Plane’tologie (CNES/IRAP) France.
Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer that will also contain an imager with high resolution to determine the fine scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials. PIXL will provide capabilities that permit more detailed detection and analysis of chemical elements than ever before. The principal investigator is Abigail Allwood, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC), a spectrometer that will provide fine-scale imaging and uses an ultraviolet (UV) laser to determine fine-scale mineralogy and detect organic compounds. SHERLOC will be the first UV Raman spectrometer to fly to the surface of Mars and will provide complementary measurements with other instruments in the payload. The principal investigator is Luther Beegle, JPL.
The Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), an exploration technology investigation that will produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. The principal investigator is Michael Hecht, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), a set of sensors that will provide measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity and dust size and shape. The principal investigator is Jose Rodriguez-Manfredi, Centro de Astrobiologia, Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aeroespacial, Spain.
The Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Exploration (RIMFAX), a ground-penetrating radar that will provide centimeter-scale resolution of the geologic structure of the subsurface. The principal investigator is Svein-Erik Hamran, Forsvarets Forskning Institute, Norway.
Curiosity's SAM instrument looks at Martian rock and sees a forest. It studies a ground up powder and the values returned are for the entire mass. If values indicate an organic molecule, it is impossible to know what minerals it was associated with in the original, unpulverized sample.
The 2020 rover will have a finer focus, looking, as it were, at individual trees or groups of trees, and studying their relationship with their surroundings. It will also create caches of particularly worthy samples capable of retrieval for return to Earth and more sophisticated study, by some as yet unplanned future mission.
NASA's press conference announcing the above info was just finishing as this was written. With visible excitement, one of the scientists on the panel explained that the close, stereoscopic extremely detailed images from the 2020 mission will "tell the story of the history of Mars." That will include the continuing search for ancient Martian microbial life.