Dust and water vapour instrument suite

Dust can pose a threat to future human missions on the Martian surface, both to the equipment and to the health of astronauts. Together with water vapour, dust is a fundamental component of the Martian atmosphere: dust cycle, dust storms, and dust devils are typical phenomena involving atmospheric dust. Additionally, dust also plays an important role as the major geophysical weathering agent.

ExoMars will be the first mission to characterise the dust and water vapour environment close to the Martian surface. Therefore, the information gathered by this suite of instruments will be extremely important to the design of future surface missions, and to understand the water vapour exchange process between the shallow subsurface and the atmosphere - an issue very relevant to the potential presence of viable organisms.

The core element of this instrument has important Rosetta heritage (the GIADA experiment). However, the more complete scheme necessary for these measurements requires some modifications to be developed for Mars use.

The main objective is to finance the manufacturing of an advanced laboratory prototype, able to verify the instrument’s end-to-end functionality.

The goals of the project will be:

• Definition of final user requirements
• Design and construction of a fully-operational, integrated laboratory breadboard with commercial components
• Laboratory testing, including dust wind tunnel evaluation
• Recommendations to further reduce the overall size, weight and power consumption of flight instrument (target mass < 0.8 kg)
• Recommendations to improve robustness, radiation hardness, reliability and ease of assembly