Proposed design basis missions for the exploration of Venus (left) and Mars (right) (Beauchamp et al. 2018; Lyness et al. 2019).
In this paper, we evaluate the scientific potential and technical feasibility of distributed instruments in planetary science. Distributed instruments are instruments designed to collect spatially and temporally correlated data from multiple networked, geographically distributed point sensors.
Distributed instruments are widely used in the Earth sciences and are routinely used in weather and climate science, earthquake research, resource exploration, industrial emissions detection, etc. However, so far their adoption in planetary surface science has been very limited.
It is natural to ask whether this lack of adoption is due to a lack of potential to address high-priority planetary science problems, or to immaturity of the technology, or both. To address this question, we investigate high-priority planetary science problems that are particularly well suited to distributed instruments.
We identify four research areas where distributed instruments have the potential to unlock answers that are largely inaccessible with monolithic sensors: studying Martian weather and climate, locating earthquakes on rock-and-ice bodies, locating trace gas emissions primarily on Mars, and magnetic measurements of interior composition. We then survey enabling technologies for distributed sensors and assess their maturity.
We identified sensor placement (including descent and landing on the planetary surface), power, and instrument autonomy as three key areas requiring further investment to make future distributed instruments a reality. Overall, this study demonstrates that distributed instruments have great potential for planetary science and paves the way for subsequent research of future distributed instruments for in situ science of the Solar System.
Federico Rossi, Robert C. Anderson, Saptarshi Bandopadhyay, Eric Brandon, Ashish Goel, Joshua Vander Hook, Michael Mishna, Michaela Villarreal, Mark Ronkiewicz
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP), Astrophysical Measurements and Methods (astro-ph.IM), Multi-Agent Systems (cs.MA), Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph), Geophysics (physics.geo-ph)
Source: arXiv:2407.01757 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2407.01757v1 [astro-ph.EP] For this version
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.01757
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Submission History
Source: Federico Rossi
[v1] Monday, July 1, 2024 19:41:41 UTC (34,588 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01757
Astrobiology,
