In 58 days NASA launches a new rover to Mars, and UNM professors and students have had a hand in creating and maintaining some of the instruments aboard.
Among the many tools on the “Curiosity” is the brand new ChemCam instrument, developed by a joint US-French team led by Dr. Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and included UNM professors and students from the Institute of Meteoritics (IOM).
ChemCam fires a laser at a rock or soil target and analyzes the refracted light to determine the rock’s chemical composition. According to the ChemCam website, the ChemCam cost around $12.5 million of NASA money to create and has taken at least 3 years to build and calibrate.
Horton Newsom, UNM ChemCam senior research scientist at the IOM, said he is looking forward to working with the rover to study Martian soil, a skill aided by the rover’s size.
“Our job is to find exciting samples,” Newsom said. “The Curiosity is the size of a small car … the previous Sojourner rover that landed on Mars in 1997 can fit through the wheel of Curiosity.”
He said NASA has made a number of advances since the last rover was launched, some of which IOM helped with.
“Science has made leaps and bounds, and UNM has been at the forefront of the modifications made for NASA’s newest rover,” Newsom said. “The ability of these robots has increased and our ChemCam instrument can record 10-20 analyses per day, where the current rovers on Mars only collected one or two samples per week.”
Penelope King, also a professor at the IOM, is a co-investigator for another instrument on Curiosity: the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer. The AXPS is a device that analyzes the chemical element composition of a sample through irrigation and x-rays.
Ph.D. students Nina Lanza, Ann Ollila and Jeff Berger will be involved in monitoring Curiosity.
“This instrument has a history with Mars rovers, and the current APXS that we are working with is going to help us understand what we’re looking at better than ever,” Berger said.
Lanza, who said she came to UNM to work with ChemCam, said the instruments may help scientists confirm if there is life on Mars by detecting hydrogen or other light elements that help create life.
IOM participated in operational tests and simulations led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based at California Institute of Technology, leading to calibration of the instruments for use on Mars.
Newsom and King, along with their students, will be operating these instruments from UNM facilities.
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“For the next two years we will be living on Mars time,” Newsom said.
Follow Curiosity on twitter @MarsCuriosity for updates.
