MITCH: Mars Investigation of Total Climatological Hazards
Of the four proposals given the tentative thumbs up, MITCH may be the one that NASA has asked to be changed most.
"NASA selected us, cut our budget by about a third then asked us to work with another project and incorporate other instruments," said Peter Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who was selected as principal investigator for the MITCH package. Smith has led teams that built cameras for the Mars Pathfinder, the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Surveyor 2001 lander.
The MITCH package, which is filling a slot designated as a soil, dust and environmental interaction experiment originally budgeted for $8.5 million, has now been allotted roughly $3 million.
The part of Smith's proposal that was accepted incorporates a radar-type device called lidar and a camera. Lidar uses a laser beam instead of radio waves to detect dirt and dust particles suspended in the atmosphere. It is designed to scan the landscape in search of dust devils, which can rise miles above the martian surface.
When the lidar detects a dust devil, it triggers the camera, which focuses in on the twisters to help scientists learn something about these swirling clouds of dust.
The still-to-be-incorporated instrument will provide sensors to measure the electrical charge of the dust devils, and determine how electrically charged the atmosphere is. It is part of a proposal that was offered by Bill Farrell, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"They've kind of mixed and matched pieces from each of our experiments because there was no way they could fund each proposal in total," Farrell said. The result -- although it will require a good deal of reorganization -- should be a very capable instrument that should make some fascinating observations, he said.
"There is a real question whether dust clouds could actually be electrical in nature. Very similar, for example, to terrestrial thunderstorms," Farrell said.
Dust devils on Earth can actually carry more charge per cubic centimeter than thunderstorms, Farrell said. Because they are so small, though, people rarely notice them as electrical events.
Farrell has proposed to build a sophisticated sort of radio receiver that can detect interference from lightning-type discharges over a wide range of radio frequencies. The interference could be heard as crackling at various radio frequencies, just as lightning on Earth interferes with AM radio.
The package will also have the ability to measure overall charge in the atmosphere and perhaps learn how well the ground conducts electricity.
None of these measurements have ever been done on Mars, Farrell said.
"You have to make these measurements at least once. Because if it is a hazard, then you've got to know about it, if it's not a hazard then you never have to worry about it again."
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