Saltation Sensor to TRL6

Aeolian processes are the primary agent of change on Mars today and, through dust lifting, control Mars climate. They also play a significant role in shaping Titan's surface. On both planets, sand-sized grains will "saltate" along the ground in wind-driven, bouncing trajectories, forming ripples and dunes where grains accumulate. Expanses of ripples and dunes have posed significant hazards to both MER vehicles and the MSL and Mars2020 rovers, affecting traverses and the efficiency of surface operations. The energy of saltating grains has eroded outcrops pervasively at both MER sites and the MSL and Mars2020 sites. Saltating grain trajectories are energetic enough also for sand to have accumulated on rover decks as well as against the fore-optics of the MSL Mastcam, ~2 m above the surface, and damaged the wind sensors on both MSL and Mars2020, thus indicating the potential hazard that saltating grains represent to future landed hardware, including infrastructure supporting potential human surface operations. The minimum wind speed required to initiate sand saltation on Mars, Titan, and Venus is unknown, currently predicted only from laboratory experiments. Likewise, saltation trajectories are poorly understood; their energy as a function of height and wind speed has only been modeled numerically and remains untested in situ. Because the grain properties as well as their kinematic behavior are fundamentally important to understanding how saltation operates on these bodies, we are developing a sensor capable of yielding a rich data set about saltating grains on (e.g.,) Mars or Titan. Existing terrestrial saltation instrumentation is inadequate for planetary application not only because of the demands for simplicity, ruggedization, and autonomy, but also because the extent of our understanding of saltating grains and associated aeolian processes is significantly less mature on other planets. For example, the leading terrestrial instrument (the "SENSIT") only counts particles and reports their energy of impact. This does not allow particle mass to be deconvolved from particle speed. The proposed project follows directly on from a previous PICASSO grant to develop our saltation sensor from concept to TRL4. Our instrument returns not only the count of impacts, but also each impacting particle's energy and momentum, and impact height. This level of information content is required to advance our understanding of the saltation process in exotic planetary environments. The existing PICASSO saltation sensor prototype is tightly coupled with a sister instrument, a sonic anemometer (also developed by this same team under PICASSO and MATISSE funding). We will mature the saltation sensor to TRL6 in this effort, leveraging highly on the electronics developed for the sonic anemometer, so that these two instruments can share back-end electronics (i.e., the instrument computer), and have significant commonality in the instrument front-end electronics and sensor transducers.

Enabling lower cost innovative remote sensing instrument development from concept through breadboard and demonstration

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