FIELD ROBOTIC EXPLORATION OF THE MOON AND MARS AT THE HAND LENS SCALE: RESULTS FROM AN ANALOG STUDY

Future field robotic missions to the Moon and Mars would need to have in-situ capabilities to enable the selection of the highest value samples. To accomplish this task efficiently, samples would need to be characterized using a suite of robotic instruments that can provide crucial information about elemental composition, mineralogy, volatiles and ices. Such spatially-correlated data sets, which place mineralogy into a microtextural context, are considered crucial for correct petrogenetic interpretations. Combining microscopic imaging with visible– near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy, provides a powerful in-situ approach for obtaining mineralogy within a microtextural context. The approach is non-destructive and requires minimal mechanical sample preparation. This approach provides data sets that are comparable to what geologists routinely acquire in the field, using a hand lens and in the laboratory using thin section petrography, and provide essential information for interpreting the primary formational processes in rocks and soils as well as the effects of secondary (diagenetic) alteration processes. Such observations lay a foundation for inferring geologic histories, provide “ground truth” for similar instruments on orbiting satellites and support real time, hypothesis-driven field exploration. The Multispectral Microscopic Imager (MMI) provides color microscopic views of rock surfaces where every pixel provides a VSWIR (visible-to-shortwave-infrared) reflectance spectrum, enabling the discrimination of a wide variety of rock-forming minerals, within a microtextural framework. Data sets acquired with the MMI provide desirable geologic and contextual information to: 1) support the in-situ, rover-based analysis of rocks and soils, and 2) guide sub-sampling of geologic materials. In the context of the astrobiological exploration of Mars, such observations could also provide a basis for inferring habitability at the microscale. We present results obtained from a deployment in the field in a Moon/Mars analog environment at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as part of NASA’s In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) activities, to showcase the microtextural and mineralogical capabilities of the MMI to support future robotic field geological exploration.