The intrepid ExoMars rover (Image: ESA)
TO A Martian, Iceland’s volcanic landscape might look a bit like home. No wonder the camera for the next Mars rover just did a test run there.
The PanCam (for Panoramic Camera) is set to travel aboard the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover in 2018. “It looks like a three-eyed monster,” says Claire Cousins, a planetary scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Two “eyes”, on the right and left of the unit, scan the terrain for noteworthy features. They also switch between filters set to different wavelengths in order to pick up subtle spectral properties of minerals – a clue to their composition. Nestling between the two is a high-resolution camera.
“It looks like a three-eyed monster, with an eye on either side to scan for noteworthy features”
Once the rover arrives on Mars in January 2019, it will drill as deep as 2 metres for soil samples. In their structure and chemical make-up, these could hold important clues to any early Martian life. Choosing promising spots to drill is tricky, however.
That’s where PanCam comes in. Its multispectral eyes will search the local rocks for signs that the environment is hospitable to life, or was in the past. Clay minerals, for example, would have formed in the presence of liquid water, while certain sulphates might suggest the soil is too acidic for life to thrive.
The three-eyed monster intended for the ExoMars rover and the Red Planet (Image: C. Cousins)
To see if PanCam is up to the task, Cousins’s team took a prototype to Námafjall, a volcanic region in north-east Iceland. There, they mounted the camera at roughly its operating height on the rover, and made it survey the region. Lab testing of samples collected in Iceland helped to confirm that the camera picked out important minerals correctly (Icarus, doi.org/34v).
The team hopes to test the camera at other Mars-like spots on Earth – a good idea, says Brian Hynek at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “For science, more tests should be completed in other environments,” he says, like places with lakes or deltas where ancient life might be preserved in sediment. “This might be the more likely type of environment in which ExoMars will land.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Iceland doubles for Red Planet in camera test”