Mars LIBS

The Mars Curiosity Rover is equipped with a scientific suite of instrumentation designed to study the surface geology of the Red planet in the hopes of learning more about Martian geological history and more about the formation of our own solar system. One of the instruments onboard the rover is the ChemCam (pictured to the left from the ChemCam website  https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/chemcam/). One of its purposes is to study Martian rocks and regolith using LIBS. One of the research thrusts of our group is to support ground analysis of spectra collected on Mars. This has included various aspects including:

• First principle hydrodynamic plasma modeling and collisional radiative simulation of emission spectra under Martian conditions in which sample ambient conditions and concentrations are the only inputs
• Advanced chemometirc/multivariate numerical modeling for increased predicative capabilities

Much if this is has been done in an effort in search of and quantification of water in the Martian spectra. Our interests in achieving this goal involve exploring the role that first principle simulations can play in predicting the amount of water in selected targets by comparing atomic hydrogen and oxygen peaks.  Pictured to the left is a series of comparisons between spectra collected on Mars and our simulations of the spectra following laser ablation of calibration targets carried to Mars on the Curiosity rover. Our continued efforts are to develop analytical protocols of LIBS measurements from the planned Mars 2020 mission. The challenge we undertake in this role is synthesize first principle physics simulations with multivariate models with appropriate uncertainty assessments.