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Curiosity’s Chemistry Instruments

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The Design and Engineering of Curiosity

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Abstract

Curiosity has four instruments that study the chemistry of Martian materials. Two of them focus on elemental abundances. ChemCam is a remote sensing instrument, able to detect the elemental composition of a rock or soil from a distance of up to 7 meters by shooting it with a laser, a technique deployed in space for the first time on Curiosity. The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) is a contact science instrument to examine the compositions of rocks and soils reached by the arm, and has a long Martian heritage.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Two papers published before the mission described ChemCam: Maurice et al. (2012) and Wiens et al. (2012)

  2. 2.

    Peret et al. (2016)

  3. 3.

    Roger Wiens, personal communication, email dated March 14, 2016

  4. 4.

    Described in detail in Peters et al. (2016)

  5. 5.

    Maurice et al. (2016)

  6. 6.

    Maurice et al. (2016)

  7. 7.

    Ollila et al. (2014)

  8. 8.

    Lanza et al. (2016)

  9. 9.

    Maurice et al. (2016)

  10. 10.

    Roger Wiens, personal communication, email dated March 26, 2016

  11. 11.

    Roger Wiens, personal communication, email dated March, 26, 2016

  12. 12.

    Cousin et al. (2014)

  13. 13.

    Roger Wiens, personal communication, email dated March 26, 2016

  14. 14.

    Francis et al. (2016)

  15. 15.

    Francis et al. (2017)

  16. 16.

    Maurice et al. (2016)

  17. 17.

    Roger Wiens, personal communication, email dated December 17, 2015

  18. 18.

    William Rapin, personal communication, email dated April 5, 2016

  19. 19.

    There is no peer-reviewed publication describing the APXS as there is for most other instruments; there is only an LPSC abstract: Gellert et al. (2009); two other good sources of information on the instrument and its performance on Mars are Gellert et al. (2015) and Campbell et al. (2012)

  20. 20.

    Farley et al. (2014)

  21. 21.

    Dickinson et al. (2012)

  22. 22.

    Perrett et al. (2017)

  23. 23.

    Slavney (2013)

  24. 24.

    Dickinson et al. (2012)

  25. 25.

    Ralf Gellert, personal communication, email dated May 10, 2016

  26. 26.

    Mariek Schmidt, personal communication, email dated April 17, 2017

  27. 27.

    Ashwin Vasavada, personal communication, email dated March 28, 2017

  28. 28.

    Ralf Gellert, personal communication, email dated May 10, 2016

  29. 29.

    Gellert et al. (2015)

  30. 30.

    Ralf Gellert, personal communication, email dated May 10, 2016

  31. 31.

    Berger et al. (2014)

  32. 32.

    Berger et al. (2016)

  33. 33.

    Thompson et al. (2016)

  34. 34.

    Schmidt et al. (2016)

  35. 35.

    Slavney (2013)

  36. 36.

    Ralf Gellert, personal communication, email dated May 10, 2016

  37. 37.

    The main reference for the description of the CheMin instrument is Blake et al. (2012); a useful summary of how it has worked on Mars is in Downs (2015)

  38. 38.

    Vaniman et al. (2014)

  39. 39.

    Léveillé et al. (2015)

  40. 40.

    David Vaniman, personal communication, email dated April 5, 2017

  41. 41.

    David Vaniman, personal communication, email dated March 8, 2017

  42. 42.

    See, for example, Treiman et al. (2016) and Morris R et al (2016)

  43. 43.

    Morris et al. (2016)

  44. 44.

    The SAM instrument description paper is Mahaffy et al. (2012); useful summaries of post-landing performance are in Millan et al. (2016) and Franz et al. (2017)

  45. 45.

    Paul Mahaffy, personal communication, email dated April 8, 2017

  46. 46.

    Webster et al. (2014)

  47. 47.

    Paul Mahaffy, personal communication, email dated April 8, 2017

  48. 48.

    Mahaffy et al. (2013)

  49. 49.

    Charles Malespin, personal communication, email dated April 12, 2017

  50. 50.

    Atreya et al. (2013)

  51. 51.

    ibid.

  52. 52.

    Conrad et al. (2016)

  53. 53.

    Lakdawalla (2013)

  54. 54.

    Charles Malespin, personal communication, email dated April 12, 2017

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Planetary Society, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Emily Lakdawalla

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  1. Emily Lakdawalla
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Lakdawalla, E. (2018). Curiosity’s Chemistry Instruments. In: The Design and Engineering of Curiosity. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68146-7_9

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