The availability of facilities capable of simulating extraterrestrial environments represents a need in today's planetary research to design, simulate and optimize those experiments carried out outside of Earth1,2. A thermal vacuum chamber (TVC) must be capable of operating under representative conditions (temperature, pressure, gas composition, radiation flux …) of space exploration targets and have a helpful volume compatible with the performing experiments and the testing of equipment under mimicked scenarios.
Stand-off spectroscopies and connected techniques have gained a proper niche within the modern tools in situ compositional analysis for space exploration using rovers. The latest missions sent for space geo-exploration, e.g. NASA's Mars 2020 mission, show that Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometry (LIBS) is currently one of the key tools in understanding mineralogy and geochemistry of planetary surface. LIBS can obtain real-time information at distances up to 12 meters, together with other techniques such as RAMAN or VIS-IR spectroscopy3.
The convenience of a TVC capable of performing stand-off spectroscopies under different analysis ranges allows reproducing the results obtained in Perseverance rover and for future missions, gaining insights about data treatment and data modelling, and anticipating experiments on Earth before the launch.
This work presents the TVC available in the UMALASER lab and the stand-off LIBS experiments carried out at different atmospheric conditions up to 12m. Furthermore, the versatility of this camera in the field of stand-off analysis will be demonstrated by combining LIBS analysis with Laser-Induced Acoustics detections or other spectroscopic techniques (i.e. Raman). This array of remote analysis techniques has been applied for the compositional analysis of geological samples under Martian atmospheric conditions of pressure (8 mbar), composition (CO2 rich atmosphere) and air temperature (250 K).
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