In the past fifteen years, five missions have returned samples of extraterrestrial material to Earth for analysis. These included missions that rendezvoused with Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), like the Hayabusa 1 and 2 and the OSIRIS-REx missions, and the Chang’e-5 and
-6 missions, which brought back samples from the far side of the Moon. In the coming years,
China plans to return samples from 469219 Kamoʻoalewa with its Tianwen-2 mission. With all the extraterrestrial materials being returned to Earth for analysis, one could argue that we are entering a “golden age of sample-return missions.”
As a result, efforts are underway to create facilities where scientists can safely contain, curate, and analyze these samples. At the University of Leicester’s Leicester Space Park, scientists are working on a Double-Walled Isolator (DWI) to store and analyze extraterrestrial materials safely. This could include future samples returned from Mars, which NASA and other space agencies are planning to do through crewed or robotic missions expected to happen during the late 2020s or early 2030s.
The DWI is essentially a miniature version of a clean room and is designed to keep materials at a high level of containment and cleanliness. This is ensured by an inert gas environment and state-of-the-art robotics (an arm and other manipulator technologies) to move samples between containment, an optical microscope, and a Raman spectrometer. These measures minimize interactions between scientists, prevent cross-contamination, and preserve sample integrity so scientists can obtain accurate results when conducting analyses.
As Andrew Cheney, DWI QM Project Manager at Space Park Leicester, said in a University of Leicester press release:
The SRR is a major milestone for the project that shows that we’ve fully understood the customer need, and translated that into a set of requirements to proceed with confidence into the design phase. Generating a good set of requirements is arguably the hardest part of any project and takes a lot of research, analysis, and industry expertise.
Now [that] we have that agreed baseline, we look forward to the design phase and the many, many challenges it will bring for this unique piece of equipment. We have a relatively compressed period now to push a concept through to detail design and manufacture. The dedicated qualification phase will involve simulating end-to-end curatorial and scientific processing of martian analogue samples at SPL.
This €5 million ($5.89 million) project was initially developed for the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission and builds on previous work where the Leicester team created a design for a prototype DWI. In the new phase, the Leicester team will be collaborating with experts from several British universities and institutes, including the Open University, the Francis Crick Institute, Imperial College London, and the Natural History Museum. They’ve also partnered with Extract Technologies, a UK-based manufacturer of advanced isolator technologies, to provide a detailed design for the main isolator and manufacture it. Said John Holt, DWI QM Principal Investigator at Space Park Leicester:
Whether or not an astronaut or a robotic spacecraft brings samples back from Mars, the Double Walled Isolator (DWI) is a key UK technology that enables planetary scientists to scrutinise returned rocks to understand the Martian environment and if there is microscopic evidence for life on the red planet. The milestone review [SRR] we have just conducted carefully looked at the complex needs of scientists to ensure we design an ultra-clean system that allows them to handle the precious samples and use a wide range of analytical techniques to unlock the secrets within each piece of rock.
The facility recently passed its System Requirements Review (SSR) with the European Space Agency (ESA) and is now proceeding to the Design and Qualification phase. Currently, there are four missions in the works to return samples from Mars, including NASA’s proposed crewed missions to Mars, China’s Tianwen-3, JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), and Russia’s Mars-Grunt mission.
Further Reading: University of Leicester