The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) will investigate environmental factors directly tied to current habitability at the Martian surface during the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. Three major habitability factors are addressed by REMS: the thermal environment, ultraviolet irradiation, and water cycling. The thermal environment is determined by a mixture of processes, chief amongst these being the meteorological. Accordingly, the REMS sensors have been designed to record air and ground temperatures, pressure, relative humidity, wind speed in the horizontal and vertical directions, as well as ultraviolet radiation in different bands. These sensors are distributed over the rover in four places: two booms located on the MSL Remote Sensing Mast, the ultraviolet sensor on the rover deck, and the pressure sensor inside the rover body. Typical daily REMS observations will collect 180 minutes of data from all sensors simultaneously (arranged in 5 minute hourly samples plus 60 additional minutes taken at times to be decided during the course of the mission). REMS will add significantly to the environmental record collected by prior missions through the range of simultaneous observations including water vapor; the ability to take measurements routinely through the night; the intended minimum of one Martian year of observations; and the first measurement of surface UV irradiation. In this paper, we describe the scientific potential of REMS measurements and describe in detail the sensors that constitute REMS and the calibration procedures.

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NASA’s Mars 2020 (M2020) rover mission includes a suite of sensors to monitor current environmental conditions near the surface of Mars and to constrain bulk aerosol properties from changes in atmospheric radiation at the surface. The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) consists of a set of meteorological sensors including wind sensor, a barometer, a relative humidity sensor, a set of 5 thermocouples to measure atmospheric temperature at ∼1.5 m and ∼0.5 m above the surface, a set of thermopiles to characterize the thermal IR brightness temperatures of the surface and the lower atmosphere. MEDA adds a radiation and dust sensor to monitor the optical atmospheric properties that can be used to infer bulk aerosol physical properties such as particle size distribution, non-sphericity, and concentration. The MEDA package and its scientific purpose are described in this document as well as how it responded to the calibration tests and how it helps prepare for the human exploration of Mars. A comparison is also presented to previous environmental monitoring payloads landed on Mars on the Viking, Pathfinder, Phoenix, MSL, and InSight spacecraft.

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The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) instrument is on board NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover. REMS has been measuring surface pressure, air, and ground brightness temperature, relative humidity, and ultraviolet (UV) irradiance since MSL's landing in 2012. In Mars Year (MY) 34 (2018) a global dust storm reached Gale Crater at Ls ~ 190°. REMS offers a unique opportunity to better understand the impact of a global dust storm on local environmental conditions, which complements previous observations by the Viking landers and Mars Exploration Rovers. All atmospheric variables measured by REMS are strongly affected albeit at different times. During the onset phase, the daily maximum UV radiation decreased by 90% between sols 2075 (opacity ~1) and 2085 (opacity ~8.5). The diurnal range in ground and air temperatures decreased by 35 and 56 K, respectively, with also a diurnal‐average decrease of ~2 and 4 K respectively. The maximum relative humidity, which occurs right before sunrise, decreased to below 5%, compared with prestorm values of up to 29%, due to the warmer air temperatures at night, while the inferred water vapor abundance suggests an increase during the storm. Between sols 2085 and 2130, the typical nighttime stable inversion layer was absent near the surface as ground temperatures remained warmer than near‐surface air temperatures. Finally, the frequency domain behavior of the diurnal pressure cycle shows a strong increase in the strength of the semidiurnal and terdiurnal modes peaking after the local opacity maximum, also suggesting differences in the dust abundance inside and outside Gale.