Rosalind Franklin, which will look for life on Mars, has passed an important procedure for high-temperature processing, which helps to clean the rover from organic molecules from the ground.
For 120 hours, the rover was in a vacuum chamber at a temperature of 35ºC at the enterprise Thales Alenia Space in Rome in Italy. This temperature is enough to remove the hidden contamination of some inner parts of the rover, for example, small pieces of glue. The ultimate goal is to extremely reduce any signs of pollution of earthly origin in order to ensure clean detection of organic compounds on Mars.
Additional analysis after heat treatment will be completed later. Thus, the analyzer Mars Organics Molecule Analyser (MOMA), one of the devices in the ultramost zone of the analytical laboratory of the Rover, which will be used to determine the signs of life in the Martian soil, will determine the chemical background in the Rover laboratory by measuring in an empty furnace. On Mars in MOMA miniature furnaces will be placed crushed soil samples, which will heat up to analyze the resulting pairs and gases for the presence of traces of organic compounds using gas chromatography. Empty furnace analysis data will be used as a sample with which you can compare future measurements on Mars.
The rover is equipped with a unique brown, which is capable of reaching a depth of 2 m near the Martian surface and return samples for analysis. The video shows that the compartment with the brown is in a horizontal position in the front. The miniature spectrometer (MA_MISS) is also installed on the drilling instrument (MA_MISS) to analyze the inner surface of the borehole and the camera for shooting a close-up (CLUPI), which will consider the drill sludge and the core sample before it falls into the rover laboratory.
Various devices will work together by analyzing the samples inside the rover. In addition to Moma, the MicroMega device will use the visible and infrared spectrum to determine the characteristics of minerals in samples, and the raman spectrometer will use a laser to determine the mineralogical composition.
Using its panoramic cameras and high-resolution cameras, as well as a subsurface radar, the Russian-European EXOMARS 2022 Mission will look for the most promising places for drilling and better understand the geological context of the Plateau region of the Oxia, which it will explore.
After the heat treatment is completed, the thermalcuum chamber was again depricted and open, and the rover is prepared for shipment back to the enterprise Thales Alenia Space in Turin. There, preparing for launch will continue until shipped on the Baikonur cosmodrome next year.