A major issue that we managed to successfully address for the Stardust Mission was the magnitude and manner of preliminary examination (PET) of the returned samples, which totaled much less than 1 mg. Not since Apollo and Luna days had anyone faced this issue, and the lessons of Apollo PET were not extremely useful because of the very different sample masses in this case, and the incredible advances in analytical capabilities since the 1960s. This paper reviews some of the techniques for examination of small very rare samples that would be returned from Mars missions.
What Can You Do with a Returned Sample of Martian Dust?
Ground Truth from Mars: Science Payoff from Sample Return Mission ; 2008 ; Albuquerque, NM, United States
2007-01-01
Conference paper
No indication
English
An automatically-returned Martian sample by 1985?
Online Contents | 1974
|Returned lunar sample analysis
NTRS | 1973
|