EPSC Abstracts Vol. 14, EPSC2020-882, 2020, updated on 24 Sep 2021 https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2020-882 Europlanet Science Congress 2020 © Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Combining ExoMars’ Ma_MISS and Drill data
Alessandro Frigeri1, Maria Cristina De Sanctis1, Francesca Altieri1, Simone De Angelis1, Marco Ferrari1, Sergio Fonte1, Michelangelo Formisano1, Eleonora Ammannito2, Raffaele Mugnuolo2, Stephen Durrant3, Frederic Haessig3, Alessandro Gily4, Francesco Antonacci5, Alessandro Fumagalli5, Samuele Novi5, Alessandro Pilati5, Andrea Rusconi5, Guido Sangiovanni5, Francesco Villa5, and Jorge L. Vago3 1Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Roma, Italy (alessandro.frigeri@inaf.it) 2Italian Space Agency (ASI), Rome, Italy 3European Space Agency (ESA) 4Thales Alenia Space Italy (TAS-I) 5Leonardo Company, Italy
The ExoMars Rover and Surface Platform planned for launch in 2022 is a large international cooperation between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos with a scientific contribution from NASA. Thales Alenia Space is the ExoMars mission industrial prime contractor.
Besides sensors and instruments characterizing the surface at large scale, the ExoMars’ rover Rosalind Franklin payload features some experiments devoted specifically to the characterization of the first few meters of the Martian subsurface. These experiments are particularly critical for the main ExoMars objective of detecting traces of present or past life forms on Mars, which may have been preserved within the shallow Martian underground [1].
Rosalind Franklin will be able to perform both non-invasive geophysical imaging of the underground [2] and subsurfacein situ measurements thanks to the Drill unit installed on the rover. The Drill has been developed by Leonardo and its purposes are 1) to collect core samples to be analyzed in the Analytical Laboratory Drawer (ALD) onboard the Rover and 2) to drive the miniaturized spectrometer Ma_MISS within the borehole.
Ma_MISS (Mars Multispectral Imager for Subsurface Studies, [3]) will collect mineralogic measurements from the rocks exposed into the borehole created by the Drill with a spatial resolution of 120 μm down to 2 meters into the Martian subsurface.
Rocks are composed of grains of minerals, and their reaction to an applied stress is related to the mechanical behavior of the minerals that compose the rock itself. The mechanical properties of a mineral depend mainly on the strength of the chemical bonds, the orientation of crystals, and the number of impurities in the crystal lattice.
In this context, the integration of Ma_MISS measurements and drill telemetry are of great importance. The mechanical properties of rocks coupled with their mineralogic composition provide a rich source of information to characterize the nature of rocks being explored by ExoMars rover’s drilling activity. Within our study, we are starting to collect telemetry recorded during the Drill unit tests on several samples ranging from sedimentary to volcanic rocks with varying degrees of weathering and water content. In this first phase of the study, we focused our attention on the variation of torque and penetration speed between different samples, which have been found to be indicative of a particular type of rock or group of rocks and their water content.
We are planning to analyze the same rocks with the Ma_MISS breadboard creating the link between the mineralogy and the mechanical response of the Drill.
This will put the base for a more comprehensive and rich characterization of the in situ subsurface observation by Rosalind Franklin planned at Oxia Planum, Mars in 2023.
Acknowledgments:We thank the European Space Agency (ESA) for developing the ExoMars Project, ROSCOSMOS and Thales Alenia Space for rover development, and Italian Space Agency (ASI) for funding the Ma_MISS experiment (ASI-INAF contract n.2017-48-H.0 for ExoMars MA_MISS phase E/science).
References
[1] Vago et al., 2017. Astrobiology, 17 6-7. [2] Ciarletti et al., 2017. Astrobiology, 17 6-7. [3] De Sanctis et al., 2017. Astrobiology, 17 6-7.
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