Away Team Droid Tech: The PIXL Instrument on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover
The Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is a micro-focus X-ray fluorescence spectrometer mounted on the robotic arm of NASA’s Perseverance rover.
PIXL will acquire high spatial resolution observations of rock and soil chemistry, rapidly analyzing the elemental chemistry of a target surface. In 10 seconds, PIXL can use its powerful 120 micrometer diameter X-ray beam to analyze a single, sand-sized grain with enough sensitivity to detect major and minor rock-forming elements, as well as many trace elements.
Over a period of several hours, PIXL can autonomously scan an area of the rock surface and acquire a hyperspectral map comprised of several thousand individual measured points.
The PIXL sensor assembly prior to integration on the rover arm turret. — physics.ins-det
Abigail C. Allwood, Joel A. Hurowitz, Benton C. Clark, Luca Cinquini, Scott Davidoff, Robert W. Denise, W. Timothy Elam, Marc C. Foote, David T. Flannery, James H. Gerhard, John P. Grotzinger, Christopher M. Heirwegh, Christina Hernandez, Robert P. Hodyss, Michael W. Jones, John Leif Jorgensen, Jesper Henneke, Peter R. Lawson, Yang Liu, Haley MacDonald, Scott M. McLennan, Kelsey R. Moore, Marion Nachon, Peter Nemere, Lauren O’Neil, David A.K. Pedersen, Kimberly P. Sinclair, Michael E. Sondheim, Eugenie Song, Nicholas R. Tallarida, Michael M. Tice, Alan Treiman, Kyle Uckert, Lawrence A. Wade, Jimmie D. Young, Payam Zamani
Comments: 2 pages, from 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, this https URL
Subjects: Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det); Applied Physics (physics.app-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:2103.07001 [physics.ins-det] (or arXiv:2103.07001v1 [physics.ins-det] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2103.07001
Focus to learn more
Submission history
From: Scott Davidoff
[v1] Thu, 11 Mar 2021 23:22:46 UTC (224 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07001
Astrobiology,
