Spain Supplies Weather Station for Next Mars Rover

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

NEWS FEATURE: 2010-400 Nov. 30, 2010

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Spain Supplies Weather Station for Next Mars Rover

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-400&cid=release_2010-400

The first instrument from Spain for a mission to Mars will provide daily weather reports from the
Red Planet. Expect extremes.

Major goals for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory include assessing the modern environment in its
landing area, as well as clues to environments billions of years ago. The environment station from
Spain will fill a central role in studying modern conditions by measuring daily and seasonal changes.

The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, or REMS, is one of 10 instruments in the mission's
science payload. REMS uses sensors on the mast, on the deck and inside the body of the mission's
car-size rover, Curiosity. Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation and Spain's Center for
Industrial Technology Development supplied the instrument. Components were installed on
Curiosity in September and are being tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

While most of Curiosity's electronics are sheltered for some protection from the Martian
environment, the team that developed and built the environmental station needed to fashion
external sensors that could tolerate the temperature extremes that some of them would be
monitoring.

"That was our biggest engineering challenge," said REMS Principal Investigator Javier Gómez-
Elvira, an aeronautical engineer with the Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain. "The sensors will
get very cold and go through great changes in temperature every day." The Center for
Astrobiology is affiliated with the Spanish National Research Council and the National Institute for
Aerospace Technology.

The air temperature around the rover mast will likely drop to about minus 130 degrees Celsius
(about minus 202 degrees Fahrenheit) some winter nights and climb to about minus 50 C (about
minus 60 F) by 12 hours later. On warmer days, afternoon air temperatures could reach a balmy 10
to 30 C (50 to 86 F), depending on which landing site is selected.

Other challenges have included accounting for how the rover itself perturbs air movement, and
keeping the entire weather station's mass to just 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds).

The instrument will record wind speed, wind direction, air pressure, relative humidity, air
temperature and ground temperature, plus one variable that has not been measured by any previous
weather station on the surface of Mars: ultraviolet radiation. Operational plans call for taking
measurements for five minutes every hour of the 23-month-long mission. Twenty-three months is
equal to approximately one Martian year.

Monitoring ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation along with other weather data will
contribute to understanding the Martian climate and will aid the mission's assessment of whether the
current environment around the rover has conditions favorable for microbial life.

"It is important to know the temperature and humidity right at ground level," said Gómez-Elvira.
Humidity at the landing sites will be extremely low, but knowing daily humidity cycles at ground
level could help researchers understand the interaction of water vapor between the soil and the
atmosphere. If the environment supports, or ever supported, any underground microbes, that
interaction could be key.

Ultraviolet radiation can also affect habitability. For example, germ-killing ultraviolet lamps are
commonly used to help maintain sterile conditions for medical and research equipment. The
ultraviolet sensor Curiosity's deck measures six different wavelength bands in the ultraviolet portion
of the spectrum, including wavelengths also monitored from above by NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The weather station will help extend years of synergy between missions that study Mars from orbit
and missions on the surface.

"We will gain information about whether local conditions are favorable for habitability, and we will
also contribute to understanding the global atmosphere of Mars," said Gómez-Elvira. "The
circulation models of the Mars atmosphere are based mainly on observations by orbiters. Our
measurements will provide a way to verify and improve the models."

For example, significant fractions of the Martian atmosphere freeze onto the ground as a south polar
carbon-dioxide ice cap during southern winter and as a north polar carbon-dioxide ice cap in
northern winter, returning to the atmosphere in each hemisphere's spring. At Curiosity's landing site
far from either pole, REMS will check whether seasonal patterns of changing air pressure fit the
existing models for effects of the coming and going of polar carbon-dioxide ice.

The sensor for air pressure, developed for REMS by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, uses a
dust-shielded opening on Curiosity's deck. The most conspicuous components of the weather station
are two fingers extending horizontally from partway up the rover's remote-sensing mast. Each of
these two REMS mini-booms holds three electronic sensors for detecting air movement in three
dimensions. Placement of the booms at an angle of 120 degrees from each other enables calculating
the velocity of wind without worrying about the main mast blocking the wind. One mini-boom also
holds the humidity sensor; the other a set of directional infrared sensors for measuring ground
temperature.

To develop REMS and prepare for analyzing the data it will provide, Spain has assembled a team of
about 40 researchers -- engineers and scientists. The team plans to post daily Mars weather reports
online.

-end-

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