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All the instruments on Perseverance Rover, what do they do?

 

NASA's Perseverance Rover landed on Mars on the 18th of February 2021, marking a huge success accomplished by NASA. This Rover is sent to test for ancient signs of life on Mars, drilling holes for samples and storing them in sealed tubes for a future mission that will collect those samples and bring them back to Earth for research. And with it, it will also test some other technologies, as it also brings a small martian helicopter, Ingenuity, to see if flight is possible in the Martian atmosphere, and it also has a device named MOXIE, which will produce oxygen on Mars from Carbon Dioxide as a test for future human missions, another instrument named MEDA, which will measure the weather and monitor dust from the surface of Mars. PIXL an X-ray spectrometer to measure the chemical makeup of rocks at a fine scale, RIMFAX, radar to see geological features underground and SHERLOC, to find fine-scale detection of minerals, organic molecules, and biosignatures. All of this is really exciting and interesting so let's have a deeper look at it, shall we?

MOXIE, WHAT IS IT?

Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment or MOXIE as we know it is a car battery-sized oxygen generator that will demonstrate if oxygen can be produced on Mars from its atmosphere for future human exploration, set to produce at about 10 grams of Oxygen per hour.

The future Oxygen Generators which we will send will be of course quite bigger than MOXIE, it is just a test to see if it can be effective.

The Oxygen produce can be used for sustaining life, obviously, and can also be used as propellant as liquid oxygen, as it would be better if we produce our propellant there on mars rather than transporting it to Mars, which will just be expensive and quite inefficient 

Now let's look at how is it going to produce Oxygen? Well for that let's look at its working, MOXIE will take in CO₂ from the Martian atmosphere and then split that molecule with electricity and head, giving out O₂ and CO, and then vented out into the Martian atmosphere.

The CO₂ Acquisition and Compression (CAC) system will take in martian atmosphere and pressurizes it, which is then passed through Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE), where it will be electrochemically split at the cathode to produce O₂ at the anode, and is only able to sun at 800℃, after which a purity test is conducted to ensure the O₂ production rate and purity of the process.

MEDA


Mars Environmental Dynamic Analyzer, MEDA, it will measure wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity and also will measure the size of dust particles.

Designed to record dust optical properties and 6 atmospheric parameters

  • Wind Speed/Direction - 2 Wind sensors measure wind speed and direction. These magnitudes are derived based on the information provided by 6 two-dimensional detectors. Being able to measure horizontal wind speed from 0 to 40 m/s 
  • Pressure - Pressure  Sensor collects pressure measurements, by a tube that exits the rover body through a small opening, it is able to measure from a range of 1-1150 Pa.
  • Humidity - Humidity sensors that sit inside a protective cylinder with a dust filter to protect the sensor from dust deposition measure the relative humidity in a 200-323K range, and within 10% accuracy.
  • Air temperature - There are 5 Air Temperature Sensors (ATS), placed on small thermal inertia forks, and outside the rover thermal boundary layers, these 5 sets of 3 thermocouples measure atmospheric temperature, being able to measure from 150K to 300K.
  • Ground temperature 
  • Radiation - Radiation and dust sensors comprise 8 upward-looking photodiodes which are able to measure radiation in ranges of-
    • 255 +/- 5 nm for O3 Hartely Band center
    • 295 +/- 5 nm for O3 Hartely Edge
    • 250-400 nm for UV
    • 450 +/- 40 nm MastCam-Z cross-calibration 
    • 650 +/- 25 nm SuperCam cross-calibration
    • 880 +/- 5 nm for MasterCam-Z cross-calibration 
    • 950 +/- 50nm
    • One panchromatic filter with an accuracy better than 8% of the full range of each Channel
           
PIXL

A Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, PIXL, it is armed with a tool called an X-ray spectrometer, being able to identify chemical elements at a tiny scale, and can also take pictures super closely.
The high X-ray flux enables PIXL to have high sensitivity and short integration times, most elements are detectable at lower concentrations.
The sensor head includes an X-ray source, X-ray optics, X-ray detectors, high voltage power supply, and a Micro context camera.
It is able to detect a total of 26+ elements and can detect elements trace at 10's ppm levels.

RIMFAX
Radar imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, RIMFAX, is a ground-penetrating radar instrument. It's ultra wideband design, operating from 150MHz - 1.2 GHz.
This will work as the Rover drives and produces individual sounding modes, some being shallow to deep sounding. 
Set to penetrate 10cm vertically, it can very well exceed that if the surface is favorable. Its goal is to image the subsurface structure and the nature of the material underlying the rover.
It can detect different subsurface layers and their relation to the visible surface.



SHERLOC
Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals, or SHERLOC can investigate organics and minerals that have been altered by watery environments and may be able to detect signs of microbial life.
It is an arm-mounted, Deep UV resonance Raman and fluorescence spectrometer using a 248.6 nm DUV laser and < 100-micron spot size.
It is highly sensitive and enables it to characterize organics and minerals, it is set to assess aqueous past of the martian surface, detect the presence of biosignatures, operating in a 7 x 7 mm area with a 500-micron depth of view, in conjunction with MAHLI autofocus mechanics and will operate 48mm above the surface.
The Deep UV-induced fluorescence is very sensitive to condensed carbon, aromatic organics, enabling it to detect 10-6 w/w at <100-μm spatial scales.
It combines two spectral phenomena, native fluorescence, and pre-resonance Raman scattering. This happens when a high radiance, narrow line-width, the laser source is focused on a sample.








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