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Micro machines: Scientific instruments for space

Terrestrial equipment isn’t, of course, designed to work in space. There are many challenges to designing instruments that will work on other planets – not least size and weight.

Scientific instruments, like microscopes, wind sensors, seismometers and radiometers, need to be designed and built for purpose if they are going to work on planets other than Earth.

This is at the core of Dr Hanna SykulskaLawrence’s work. A highlight of her career so far was helping to design and fabricate a microscope that was used for NASA’s Phoenix mission to Mars in 2008.

The microscope she worked on was smaller than the size of a matchbox and sat inside the MECA (Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyser) chamber.

Dr Sykulska-Lawrence, from the University’s Aeronautics and Astronautics Group, was working at Imperial College London at the time. She said: “We designed and fabricated parts of the instrument, and then controlled it on the surface of Mars, and analysed the data at the end.

Dr Hanna Sykulska-Lawrence

“We were able to look at the Martian ‘soil’ with unprecedented resolution and, from this, deduce how dry Mars really is.”

Dr Sykulska-Lawrence’s work on miniaturising instrumentation for space has also seen her involved in designing other miniaturised instruments to explore the surface of Mars, and now she is moving on to designing instruments for different planets.

Her current projects at Southampton include developing a miniature radiometer to explore the atmosphere of Venus, and also a Raman spectrometer for the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The Raman spectrometer project was the focus of Aria Vitkova’s PhD (outlined on page 24), which Dr SykulskaLawrence supervised.

Artist’s depiction of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander monitoring the atmosphere overhead and the soil below. Image courtesy of NASA

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