PDF version of COSPAR - Space Science Research in Canada Report

of water on Mars is a scientific priority because of its relevance to the question ofwhether the planet ever supported life.Gellert was part of scientific team at Germany’s Max Planck Institute forChemistry that built similar instruments for the Pathfinder mission that landed onMars in 1997, and the two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit andOpportunity, that landed in January, 2004, and are still exploring Mars. However,in 2004, Gellert found out that his department was being closed, so he beganlooking for a new institution where he could continue development of APXS forfuture planetary missions.That turned out to be the University of Guelph, in large part through the efforts ofIain Campbell, a Guelph scientist with whom Gellert had already collaborated.Campbell runs a facility called PIXE (proton-induced x-ray emission) that uses atechnique similar to that employed by APXS.The Canadian Space Agency agreed to fund Gellert’s research and is supportingdevelopment of APXS for the MSL mission, one of only ten instruments selectedby NASA in an international competition. “This was an exciting opportunity,” saidVicky Hipkin, CSA’s Program Scientist for Planetary Exploration. “When a bigmission like this comes along, it’s a very rare opportunity for Canadianscientists.”Because of the orbital positions of the planets, missions to Mars can only belaunched every two years, and relatively few are open to internationalcompetition. “Canada has taken a strategic decision not to have its own launchcapability so this makes us very much in favour of international collaboration andit makes us a good partner to other agencies,” Hipkin said.MSL will be the largest rover ever sent to Mars, and it will carry the mostadvanced set of instruments to date. The APXS instrument on this mission, forexample, works five times faster than its predecessor on the MER rovers.The primary goal is to determine whether the environment on Mars is, or everwas, capable of supporting microbial life. According to NASA, investigating thepast habitability of Mars gives the scientific community “a better understanding ofwhether life could have existed on the Red Planet and, if it could have existed, anidea of where to look for it in the future.”One important way of doing this is to study rocks and soils, which contain aninvaluable record of Mars’ geological and climatic past. Scientists know that Marsonce had a considerable amount of liquid water on its surface and that it currently40