A sophisticated lander for scientific exploration of Mars: scientific objectives and implementation of the Mars-96 Small Station

The Noise Model of the SEIS Seismometer of the InSight Mission to Mars

“…Lognonné et al (1996) for wind shield tests made for InterMarsnet). For OPTIMISM on Mars 96, this was made by the Small Station itself, see Linkin et al (1998).…”

Planetary Seismology

“…Additional LP vertical seismic output (10 À11 lunar g resolution) for free oscillation detection, with a 16-Hz sampling Installation performed by crew Weber (1971), Tobias (1978) Viking seismometers were deployed in 1976 by the Viking mission; however, one was never unlocked, and the other provided no convincing event detection after 19 months of nearly continuous operation (Anderson et al, 1977a,b). Twenty years later, both Optimism seismometers (Lognonné et al, 1998a) onboard small surface stations (Linkin et al, 1998) and the Kamerton short-period (SP) seismometers (Khavroshkin and Tsyplakov, 1996) onboard two penetrators were lost as part of the Mars 96 mission. Another 20 years will now pass before the return of the first data from the NASA InSight mission, which is planned to launch and land in 2016.…”

“…No events were convincingly detected during the seismometer's 19 months of nearly continuous operation, and, as shown by Goins and Lazarewicz (1979), this absence of recorded events was probably related to the inadequate sensitivity of the seismometer in the frequency bandwidth of teleseismic body waves, as well as the device's high sensitivity to wind noise (Nakamura and Anderson, 1979). In 1996, the Mars 96 mission was launched, with each of the mission's two small stations (Linkin et al, 1998) carrying an OPTIMISM seismometer in its payload (Lognonné et al, 1998a). The sensitivity of the OPTIMISM seismometer was improved by about two orders of magnitude relative to the Viking seismometers at frequencies of 0.5 Hz, and as a result, the OPTIMISM devices were better adapted to teleseismic body-wave detection.…”

History of Applications of Radioactive Sources in Analytical Instruments for Planetary Exploration

“…Besides the 242 Cm and 244 Cm that were used in the APXS, the Mössbauer experiment on the MER mission used about 400 millicuries of 57 Co at the start of the mission, to obtain the mineralogy of the iron bearing rocks [10]. Similarly, 55 Fe has been used in an XRF instrument on Viking mission in 1976 [11] and on the Beagle 2 mission in 2003 [12].…”

“…Therefore, an additional mode has been added to the original ASI instrument to detect the resulting characteristic x-rays that are produced when a sample is bombarded with a beam of alpha particles and x-rays from the same radioactive source. It is the combination of all three modes, the Rutherford alpha backscattering, the x-ray fluorescence (XRF) and the particle PIXE techniques that resulted in one integrated low power, low volume, but very powerful Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) analytical instrument [8] that has been used in so many space missions [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. A refined and miniaturized instrument with alpha, proton and x-ray modes (the "AlphaProton X-ray Spectrometer by Economou et al, 1976[8]) was proposed for analysis of Martian surface material during preparation for the Viking missions, but it was not selected for that mission.…”