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Post Info TOPIC: ExoMars mission
Blobrana


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RE: ExoMars mission
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The boss of the European Space Agency has asked his officials to find a new name for the flagship ExoMars mission.
Jean Jacques Dordain said the rover concept had changed so radically since first envisioned and costed that it was really now a new venture.

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Blobrana


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The European Space Agency (Esa) has drawn up its shortlist of the best places to look for life on Mars.
Esa will launch a mission called ExoMars in 2013 in which a robot rover will search the Martian surface for evidence of past or present life.
The locations on the shortlist are all being targeted as potential landing sites for these missions.
They host some of Mars' oldest rocks, which were in contact with water just after the planet's formation.

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Blobrana


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Autonomous systems developed for ESAs ExoMars rover, which will allow it to analyse Martian terrain and identify the best point on rocks to drill for samples without need for human intervention, could treble the speed in which the rover can collect a sample, compared to previous Mars rovers.
In simulations, now being backed up by laboratory tests in the Mars Yard
at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the rover first builds up a three-dimensional model of its surroundings and then analyses each rock for surfaces suitable for drilling. The rover can then calculate the adjustments needed to position its chassis, robotic arm and instruments to acquire the sample.

 This system allows the rover to do more than find nice flat areas to drill. The versatility of our system and its ability to pinpoint the best site to take samples, even from complex micro-features on rocks, could be vital when looking for evidence of exobiology - Dr Dave Barnes, who is presenting results at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam on Monday 20th August.

In recent Mars missions, up to 40% of operations time has been taken up with defining, planning, rehearsing, scheduling and uploading every move that the rover makes on the surface of Mars. For NASAs Mars Exploration Rovers, three Martian days can elapse between a target being identified and the rover actually acquiring the sample. The autonomous systems developed by the Aberystwyth team should bring that time for ExoMars down to less than one Martian day.
Software developed by the team, who worked with EADS Astrium on the Phase A study for ExoMars, uses stereo images to build up a digital elevation model and to classify features into six categories: peaks, ridges, passes, planes, channels and pits. The level of detail for each feature can be varied by adjusting the number or data points, the slope and the minimum curvature for the model. The rover selects a suitable surface, then tags the optimum drilling point and calculates how to move the instruments at the end of its robotic arm into position.

We are now starting an exciting experimental phase of study with our Concept-E rover chassis model, which has six wheels that can drive, turn and move up and down independently. This gives us eighteen degrees of freedom when adjusting the pitch, roll and yaw of the chassis. We are working on a unified control system for the chassis and the robotic arm, which itself has four degrees of freedom, so the rover can manoeuvre itself to access samples even in hard to reach places. This puts us at a new level of manoeuvrability compared to Mars landers that have flown to date - Dr Dave Barnes.

The Concept-E rover will be operated on the newly completed Planetary Analogue Terrain (PAT) at Aberystwyth, a 50 metre squared sculpted landscape, complete with a drilling pit, covered with soil and rocks that have been selected for their Mars-like properties.

The majority of our work to date has been in simulation but there is no substitute for experiments with real hardware. We are looking forward to repeating our experiments with a real rover and instruments in our new PAT laboratory - Dr Dave Barnes.

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Blobrana


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The European Space Agency (Esa) is pushing forward with its design for a rover mission to send to Mars in 2013.
Project teams have been authorised to investigate a concept that would launch a 205kg robot on a heavy-lift rocket.
The vehicle, expected to land in September 2014, would be equipped with a 16.5kg package of instruments to search for past or present life.

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Blobrana


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The project to design and build a European rover to send to Mars has passed an important milestone.
Engineers have demonstrated a vented, or dead-beat, airbag technology that could be used to cushion the vehicle's landing on the Red Planet.
An effective entry, descent and landing system will be critical to the success of the ExoMars mission, as it is known.

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Blobrana


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Talks to resolve the design of Europe's rover mission to Mars are converging on a "best solution for science", a senior space official has told the BBC.
The option in question would require an upgrade to the original vision.
But observers fear some European Space Agency (Esa) delegates could still baulk at the enormous costs of an enhanced mission.
It will test the resolve of member states to avoid the unthinkable - killing off the flagship project.

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Blobrana


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Europe's plans to send a robotic rover to the Red Planet in 2013 face a critical review this week.
A top-level panel will meet in Paris to choose a single design concept for the mission and determine whether the ambitious proposals are affordable.
The European Space Agency delegates are being asked to approve an upgraded - and much more expensive - vision than the one originally outlined.
This would see ExoMars travel with an orbiter to relay data back to Earth.

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Blobrana


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Urey
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NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.
The instrument, called Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector, has already shown its capabilities in one of the most barren climes on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile. The European Space Agency has chosen this tool from the United States as part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013. Last month, NASA selected Urey for an instrument-development investment of $750,000.
The European Space Agency plans for the ExoMars rover to grind samples of Martian soil to fine powder and deliver them to a suite of analytical instruments, including Urey, that will search for signs of life. Each sample will be a spoonful of material dug from underground by a robotic drill.

"Urey will be able to detect key molecules associated with life at a sensitivity roughly a million times greater than previous instrumentation" - Dr. Jeffrey Bada of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Bada is the principal investigator for an international team of scientists and engineers working on various components of the device.
To aid in interpreting that information, part of the tool would assess how rapidly the environmental conditions on Mars erase those molecular clues.

"The main objective of ExoMars is to search for life. Urey will be a key instrument for that because it is the one with the highest sensitivity for organic chemicals" - Dr. Pascale Ehrenfreund of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

Ehrenfreund, one of two deputy principal investigators for Urey, coordinates efforts of team members from five other European countries.
Urey can detect several types of organic molecules, such as amino acids, at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion.
All life on Earth assembles chains of amino acids to make proteins. However, amino acids can be made either by a living organism or by non-biological means. This means it is possible that Mars has amino acids and other chemical precursors of life but has never had life. To distinguish between that situation and evidence for past or present life on Mars, the Urey instrument team will make use of the knowledge that most types of amino acids can exist in two different forms. One form is referred to as "left-handed" and the other as "right-handed." Just as the right hand on a human mirrors the left, these two forms of an amino acid mirror each other.
Amino acids from a non-biological source come in a roughly 50-50 mix of right-handed and left-handed forms. Life on Earth, from the simplest microbes to the largest plants and animals, makes and uses only left-handed amino acids, with rare exceptions. Comparable uniformity -- either all left or all right -- is expected in any extraterrestrial life using building blocks that have mirror-image versions because a mixture would complicate biochemistry.

"The Urey instrument will be able to distinguish between left-handed amino acids and right-handed ones" - Allen Farrington, Urey project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will build the instrument to be sent to Mars.

If Urey were to find an even mix of the mirror-image molecules on Mars, that would suggest life as we know it never began there. All-left or all-right would be strong evidence that life now exists on Mars, with all-right dramatically implying an origin separate from Earth life. Something between 50-50 and uniformity could result if Martian life once existed, because amino acids created biologically gradually change toward an even mixture in the absence of life.
The 1976 NASA Viking mission discovered that strongly oxidizing conditions at the Martian surface complicate experiments to search for life. The Urey instrument has a component, called the Mars oxidant instrument, for examining those conditions.

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Blobrana


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RE: ExoMars mission
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More than 30 years ago, when NASA’s two Viking landers looked for signs of life on Mars, the results were ambiguous. Although no strong evidence has since emerged for life on Mars, the planet now seems considerably more hospitable than it once did – especially since the announcement last December that liquid water had flowed on its surface within the last few years.
But it will be the European Space Agency (ESA), with its ExoMars mission, that will deliver the first comprehensive life-detection science package since Viking to the Martian surface. Like Viking, ExoMars will consist of an orbiter and a lander, but the lander will include a rover capable of travelling several kilometres. The spacecraft is scheduled for launch in 2013.

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Blobrana


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Cosmic Vision programme
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At a time when European science budgets are increasingly under pressure UK academia and industry representatives met in London (24th January 2007) to look at opportunities for exploiting space using low cost satellites.
UK industry and academia has developed a unique partnership in designing and building compact and extremely cost effective satellites packed with innovative technology including miniaturised instrumentation, robotics, software and autonomous systems. Such small spacecraft can make a real contribution to scientific research, environmental monitoring, navigation and communications, alongside more traditional larger missions.
Through the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cosmic Vision programme, which looks at an exploration programme for the time period of 2015-2025, there will inevitably be great opportunities for UK industry and academia to provide lead roles in medium and large missions. Ahead of this it is anticipated that there will be several precursor technology demonstrator missions within ESA’s Aurora programme which will need lower cost technologies developed over a shorter timescale, and this is where the UK could exploit its expertise in small satellites.

"Whilst it is recognised that some space missions can only be achieved using larger platforms frontier science can be obtained by smaller, more defined satellites. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. The miniaturised instrumentation produced for missions such as Rosetta and in development for ExoMars alongside the recent feasibility study for two lunar missions demonstrate the knowledge and expertise we have here in the UK. There is huge potential for industry and academia to work closer together to take this forward for future missions opportunities" - Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)

Source Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)

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