AVS 53rd International Symposium
    Vacuum Technology Wednesday Sessions
       Session VT-WeA

Invited Paper VT-WeA5
Report from the Mars Chapter

Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 3:20 pm, Room 2000

Session: Space-based Vacuum Applications and Instrumentation; Panel Discussion on Vacuum Science and Technology
Presenter: M.H. Hecht, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Correspondent: Click to Email
This august organization represents generations of vacuum lore acquired for the sole purpose of preventing 100,000 Pa of a predominantly oxygen/nitrogen mixture laced with rare gases from fouling up important scientific experiments and lucrative fabrication processes. With this problem largely solved, our attention has fastened on the experiments and processes themselves, as well as their products, which now form the subject of most of our symposia. But for those of us in the Mars exploration business, constrained to pitifully small mass and power budgets and faced with excluding only 1,000 Pa of predominantly carbon dioxide, a new set of solutions to the original problem becomes attractive. The native atmosphere is thin enough for some experiments that would prefer vacuum on Earth, such as x-ray analysis or scanned probe microscopy, but is more severe than Earth with respect to others, such as those sensitive to triboelectricity. Getters are sufficient for some applications, including mass spectroscopy. This talk will cover some of the basic characteristics of working in the martian atmosphere (thermal properties, for example), and will review the adaptation of analytical instruments to that environment.