The Radiation and Dust Sensor is one of six sensors of the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer onboard the Perseverance rover from the Mars 2020 NASA mission. Its primary goal is to characterize the airbone dust in the Mars atmosphere, inferring its concentration, shape and optical properties. Thanks to its geometry, the sensor will be capable of studying dust-lifting processes with a high temporal resolution and high spatial coverage. Thanks to its multiwavelength design, it will characterize the solar spectrum from Mars’ surface. The present work describes the sensor design from the scientific and technical requirements, the qualification processes to demonstrate its endurance on Mars’ surface, the calibration activities to demonstrate its performance, and its validation campaign in a representative Mars analog. As a result of this process, we obtained a very compact sensor, fully digital, with a mass below 1 kg and exceptional power consumption and data budget features.
A composite optical bench made up of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) skin and aluminum honeycomb has been developed for the Tunable Magnetograph instrument (TuMag) for the SUNRISE III mission within the NASA Long Duration Balloon Program. This optical bench has been designed to meet lightweight and low sensitivity to thermal gradient requirements, resulting in a low Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE). In addition to the flight model, a breadboard model identical to the flight one has been manufactured, including embedded fiber Bragg temperature and strain sensors. The aim of this is to explore if the use of distributed fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) can provide valuable information for strain and temperature mapping of an optical instrument on board a space mission during its operation as well as its on-ground testing. Furthermore, surface-mounted strain FBG sensors and thermocouples have been installed in the optical bench for intercomparison purposes. This paper presents the results obtained from a thermal vacuum test consisting of three thermal cycles with stabilization steps at 100 °C, 60 °C, 20 °C and −20 °C. Experimental results provide information about how FBG embedded temperature sensors can provide a proper and quick response to the temperature changes of the optical bench and that embedded FBG strain sensors are able to measure micro-deformation induced in a close-to-zero CTE optical bench.
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