Abstract

The human exploration of the solar system will include the construction of a manned base on Mars. There is a need for surveys of the surface-material resources and surface atmospheric conditions of several places on the planet, where the data is to be taken on a human, rather than global, scale. This paper describes some potential instrumentation, using newly available technology compatible with surface penetrators or other hard-lander implementations, for measuring the surface materials and atmosphere of Mars. An extremely rugged, small, lightweight, and thermally self-compensating camera optical system has been designed for microspacecraft applications. It is also ideal for a penetrator. Research in acousto-optical tunable filter (AOTF) technology and spectral data collection has matured sufficiently that we can consider the addition of a narrow-band, tunable filter to the camera, thus obtaining a low-cost, low-power, rugged imaging spectrometer. Detectors and control electronics have been miniaturized and can be mounted to survive hard landings. Software systems for data selection and analysis based on the hierarchical selection of spectral bands will decrease the amount of data to be uplinked to an amount that is compatible with penetrator technology.

© 1990 Optical Society of America