Mini_pumps ? life on Mars☄️🌑

MINI-PUMPS

The same miniaturized pumps on the Mars Curiosity rover are at work on Earth. Finding evidence of life on Mars requires high-tech equipment, whether that life is extinct or currently living below the surface and producing methane. Those same resources can be used on this planet during an industrial accident or dangerous chemical spill to let emergency crews know what they’re dealing with. But that’s only if the equipment can be used onsite. A mass spectrometer offers that kind of support on and off this planet. A mass spectrometer analyzes ionized samples of material by measuring the mass of the ionized molecules to determine the ratio of different isotopes in it or learn about the structure of its molecules. This information can be used to determine a sample’s age, how it formed or what molecules it contains (See Distant Encounters). But to land on Mars or be available for onsite emergency use on Earth, this equipment needs to be smaller and more rugged than the large models used in laboratories. So NASA kicked off that particular technology revolution. One of the most important instruments on the car-sized rover investigating the surface of Mars is called Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM). SAM needed a mass spectrometer to study material from the planet. And just like any other instrument that has to be blasted out of Earth’s gravitational field, the components needed to be small and tough. That miniaturized mass spectrometer for space didn’t exist. To help industry understand what NASA needed, the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California hosted a series of workshops, says Patricia Beauchamp, who led JPL’s Centers for In Situ Exploration and Sample Return at the time. NASA engineers and industry representatives came together, and “Creare was one of the few companies that stepped up to the plate to do the miniaturization required” for mass spectrometers in space, she says. Finding proof of life on Mars requires high-tech equipment. Vacuum pumps are used to remove air from the chamber. This prevents the ions from colliding with gas molecules on their way to the instrument’s detector. “Mass spectrometers need to reach an internal pressure 10 orders of magnitude lower than the 760 torr atmospheric pressure on Earth,” explains Bob Kline-Schoder, president of Creare LLC in Hanover, New Hampshire. The pressure created by vacuum pumps inside a spectrometer is “not as low as it is in space, but it’s pretty darn close.” The vacuum pump also had to be lightweight and very efficient. Rodger Farley, a senior aerospace engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which led the development of SAM, says the pump had to do even more. It had to withstand the heat sterilization required by planetary protection directives: exposure to 239 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 60 hours. After successfully meeting the Curiosity rover requirements, Creare continued to work with NASA. The company developed a smaller version that’s about half the size of the SAM pumps. The effort created a miniature vacuum pump that is now meeting a growing demand in commercial applications such as the development of smaller mass spectrometers. “Over the years, we’ve built one that’s about the size of a soda can, and now we’ve built this one for NASA that’s half the size—more like a C-cell battery,” says Kline-Schoder. A device that size could easily be used in a handheld instrument to test samples at the site of an industrial accident or hazardous chemical spill, providing results more quickly than shipping samples to a lab. The vacuum pump Creare developed for NASA’s Curiosity rover was based on a device about the size of a soda can, which the company was able to miniaturize to the size of a C battery (inset). Creare is now working on a similar vacuum pump for the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars Rover, a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos scheduled to launch in 2022. (Image Credit: European Space Agency) “Our vision of the future is to get rid of the instrument that looks like two microwave ovens sitting on top of each other at the airport screening line, and you have a shoebox-sized device that every single TSA agent is carrying with them, which they can use to sniff out possible explosives,” he says. The commercial market for miniature turbopumps used by compact and portable mass spectrometers could include healthcare, environmental, defense and industrial applications. Recent work done to make the pumps tolerant to vibration and shock could develop into remote, autonomous or field environment applications. On Mars, meanwhile, Creare’s pump has allowed Curiosity to find key ingredients for life, such as sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon, along with clay minerals that suggest a past aquatic environment—one that probably even included drinkable water