Biology
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006agufm.p51c1208b&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006, abstract #P51C-1208
Biology
5464 Remote Sensing, 5470 Surface Materials And Properties, 6055 Surfaces, 6225 Mars, 6297 Instruments And Techniques
Scientific paper
The surfaces of rocky planetary bodies are chiefly ices and silicates. These materials have primary vibrational absorption bands at around 8-12 micons due to Si-O bending (silicates) and at around 3 microns due to H2O bending vibrations (water ices). These vibrations lie in the Thermal Infrared (TIR) region of the spectrum. This region is challenging for passive remote sensing methods due to the relatively low numbers of photons of this energy being reflected or emitted by cold planetary surfaces. We have tested an active reflectance and polarization sensor in the TIR region of the spectrum to determine the utility of an active sensing system for future rover missions to the Moon, asteroids, comets and airless satellites of the outer planets. Mars is also a possible target. A variety of samples were chosen in order to get an appreciation for the breadth of reseach required to characterize materials of different albedo, specularity and roughness. Two sulfate samples, gypsum and anhydrite, were chosen due to the strong possibility sulfates are present on Europa (Dalton, 2003) and the fact that gypsum and other sulfates have been detected on Mars (eg. Langevin, et. al 2005). The two other samples - labradorite and ilmenite, are known to be present on the Moon (Crown and Pieters, 1987, Raymond and Wenk, 1971). No ices were prepared for this study since the instrument was only able to operate in ambient conditions. The instrumental apparatus we used is capable of obtaining transmission or reflectance measurements and fully describing the complete polarization state of light reflected from a target surface (Goldstein and Chenault, 2002). We used the instrument to measure the reflectance of the samples, and obtained the polarization state in the form of a Mueller matrix as a function of wavelength. The results will be reported at this workshop and we will outline the direction of future investigations. We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Christian Grund at Ball Aerospace for his assistance on this project. References Crown, D.A. and Pieters, C.M. (1987) Spectral properties of plagioclase and pyroxene mixtures and the interpretation of lunar soil spectra, Icarus 72, 492-506 Dalton, J.B. (2003) Spectral Behavior of Hydrated Sulfate Salts: Implications for Europa Mission Spectrometer Design. Astrobiology 3(4) 771-784. Goldstein, D.H. and Chenault, D.B. (2002) Spectropolarimetric reflectometer, Optical Engineering, 41(5), 1013- 1020. Langevin, Y., et al. (2005) Sulfates in the North Polar Region of Mars Detected by OMEGA/Mars Express. Science, 307 (5715), 1584-1586. Raymond, K.N. and Wenk, H.R. (1971) Lunar ilmenite (Refinement of the crystal structure). Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 30(2) 135-140.
Brown Justin A.
Chenault David B.
Goldstein Dennis H.
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