Rock Specimens for Laboratory Drill and Compositional Testing for the Ma_MISS experiment onboard ESA/ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Mission to Mars

The ESA ExoMars mission, which will look for traces of past and present life on Mars, is planned for 2028. The Rosalind Franklin rover will land within a 115 by 15 km ellipse centered at Oxia Planum, a gently sloped broad plain connecting the outlet of Cogoon Vallis channels with Chryse Planitia.  

The Rosalind Franklin rover is equipped with a state-of-the-art drilling system capable of reaching depths 2 meters below the surface.    Next to the tip of the drill is the miniaturized spectrometer Ma_MISS, which will record the compositional variation along the drilling hole.    The combination of the advanced tool and instrument onboard Rosalind Franklin will provide us with unprecedented insights into the shallow subsurface of Mars, which we know little about but could potentially harbor life.

The Ma_MISS scientific team is preparing for the ExoMars mission to Mars by studying terrestrial analogs in the field and the laboratory.   We are collecting samples from a pool of possible geological environments expected at Oxia.   We are using the recently published geologic map of the Oxia Planum ExoMars landing ellipse as a reference to select analog samples to bring to the laboratory. The samples collected in the field are stored and cataloged at the Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali (IAPS) in Rome, Italy. The DAVIS (Drill for Analogues and Visible-Infrared Spectrometer) laboratory setup at IAPS will be used to drill and do compositional mapping on the samples.

Here, we present the case of a set of samples acquired in a fluvial-lacustrine environment showing fossilized sedimentary structures representing an optimal environment for microbial life.    With DAVIS, we simulate the combined action of the Rosalind Franklin drill and Ma_MISS in-hole compositional analysis, building a library of experiments with different geologic settings in preparation for the actual mission.

Acknowledgments:  This work is supported by the ASI-INAF Mars Exploration agreement code 2023-3-HH_0.