Development of Wireless Sensor Node for Future In situ Investigation of MARS

Abstract

ABSTRACT newlineIt is known that the surface of Mars is covered with regolith, almost everywhere. There have been few missions, operating on Martian surface to study various physical quantities of interest. The Martian regolith has large amount of iron content. Hematite is an iron oxide and very important for the study of climatic evolution of Mars. In a given opportunity one may be interested to investigate the hematite mixed with regolith, if any. In order to carry out such investigations like measurement of hematite mixed with regolith, designed an in-situ compact wireless sensor, capable of measuring Electromagnetic properties of the soil. In this thesis, presented its design aspects, testing results of terrestrial soil as well as the results of Martian soil simulant. The Martian soil Mojave Mars Simulant (MMS) is selected as the analogue material for the testing. Wireless Dielectric Sensor Node is a novel form of sensor that has been designed as a laboratory model for future space applications. Laboratory EM property analyses should be performed on Earth before allowing the commitment to bring an EM instrument to Mars and taken at room temperature. At low frequency permittivity of MMS is higher and then drop down and permittivity of the earth s sand is remaining constant at low frequency also. So, this results match with the characteristics of hematite doped soil. It indicates that in a dry soil, which contains a significant fraction of magnetic material give the significance to the presence of hematite in soil. The results are validated using distilled water, whose properties are known. The sensor works in the frequency domain range is between 10 kHz to 100 kHz with capability to sweep the frequency in a given measurement range and measures the soil impedance. The results are useful to understand the hygroscopic characteristics of Marian soil or to obtain the iron content mixed with the regolith by the sensor, after upgrading in space-worthy version. The EM properties of Martian soils were found and results give t