Every August for the past several years, a consortium of scientists head off for an expedition to the island of Spitsbergen (part of the Svalbard archipelago), only about 600 miles from the North Pole. The now-annual expedition is called the Arctic Mars Analogue Svalbard Expedition (AMASE) (e.g.,Steele et al., 2008). In 2008, part of the expedition`s goal is to test instruments which belong to the scientific payload of the upcoming ExoMars mission of the European Space Agency. One of these instruments is PanCam, the camera of ExoMars (Jaumann et al., 2000), heritage from the former Netlander mission, which is partly built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). A member of DLR`s PanCam team will join the expedition with a breadboard model of the camera to test it under the harsh arctic conditions.
An overview of the AMASE 2008 campaign with itinerary, field sites, crew members, and instruments
Last update: 15/03/2011 15:04