Vacuum chamber built to create Mars on Earth

SCIENTISTS have built Mars here on Earth – at least within the walls of a simulation chamber that mimics conditions on the Red Planet down to its Martian dust, according to a report.

The Spanish researchers built a vacuum chamber to reproduce conditions including temperature, pressure, gas composition and radiation on Mars, to help test gear designed for missions to the fourth planet from the sun.

The rovers, and their advanced sensors and instruments, are being used in Nasa missions aimed at discovering whether the planet could ever have supported life.

The lead researcher is Jose Angel Martin-Gago, of Madrid’s Instituto de Ciencias de Materiales. His team is collaborating with Nasa, mainly in helping develop meteorological instruments for upcoming rovers.

Mars vacuum chambers have already been used to test some of the weather sensors aboard the Nasa rover Curiosity, launched in 2012.

But the team has now incorporated another key factor in how sensitive instruments operate on Mars, they explained in their report in the journal “Review of Scientific Instruments”.

“We’re simulating the effect of the Martian dust – one of the primary problems for planetary exploration – to gain a better understanding of how instruments behave when covered in dust,” Jesus Sobrado, in charge of the machine’s technical development, said. –AFP