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"  Before they send out their rovers and sensors to explore space and other planets, spacecraft engineers do what they can with tests and models to predict how their creations will handle these new environments. But it would be more informative if they could give new spacecraft a sampling of their destination before they leave the home world. Scientists in Spain are doing this with a test chamber, just announced Tuesday in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, which simulates conditions on Mars with great accuracy. In the Marte chamber, new scientific instruments\u2014including the sensitive type that will look for life\u2014get a taste of Mars right here on Earth. Engineers for years have used test chambers in which they subject spacecraft and instruments to a slew of space dangers including radiation, violent shaking, blistering cold and searing hot temperatures, and vacuum pressures. But these horror chambers are built to test one thing at a time, so they don&amp;#039;t paint a full picture of the conditions a spacecraft might encounter. In 2007, for instance, researchers at Aarhus University developed a Mars wind tunnel to simulate dust storms and Martian temperatures, but it wasn&amp;#039;t designed to test other factors such as radiation. Marte is different, the researchers say, because it can be adapted for almost any threat Mars presents, from dust storms to changing seasons. It was designed in a modular fashion, so it can be enlarged to accommodate bigger instruments. Mars is unfriendly to spacecraft in myriad ways, but one of its chief dangers is dust, which can invade sensitive electronics. Shortly after the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed 10 years ago, their table-like solar panels started filling up with dust. Luckily, Mars is also windy, so the spacecraft would get occasional cleanings. Just last week Opportunity experienced a &amp;quot;dust cleaning event,&amp;quot; in NASA parlance, which gave it a 10 percent boost in power. But the dust and sand became too much for Spirit, which succumbed in 2010.  The Marte chamber can mimic these conditions, depositing dust on instruments, blowing dust around as in a storm, and dispersing dust evenly throughout the chamber. It dispenses iron oxide particles, like those detected on Mars, through two vibrating sieves. &amp;quot;We could disperse dust throughout the vacuum chamber, creating a homogeneous layer that allows us to simulate the atmosphere, temperature, and the dusty conditions of the planet,&amp;quot; the Marte researchers explain in their paper. Marte&amp;#039;s first subjects were three duplicates of the Rover Environment Monitoring Station instruments that are now on board the Curiosity rover. The designers compared data from the real REMS instrument, and found their system can reliably mimic the air pressure, temperature, and radiation changes that happen on Mars\u2014validating Marte as a proxy for what an instrument will face. Next up is the Temperature and Wind for Insight package, which will become part of the new Insight probe planned to drill into Mars, according to Jose Angel Mart\u00EDn-Gago, a research professor at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid. Future sims will test instruments that could be capable of detecting life, like the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer and Sign of Life Detector proposed for the still-unnamed 2020 Rover. The chamber could also work in concert with larger, whole-spacecraft proving grounds like NASA&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Chamber of Horrors,&amp;quot; otherwise known as the Environmental Test Engineering and Integration facility at Goddard Space Flight Center. In this chamber spacecraft are subjected to the traumatic shaking of launch, the vacuum of space, and radiation. A 40-foot thermal vacuum chamber can test the optics for the behemoth James Webb Space Telescope, reaching temperatures of just 14 Kelvin ( minus 434 degrees F). Beyond Mars, a spacecraft torture chamber like Marte also could simulate places such as the icy Jupiter moon Europa, interplanetary space, or the interstellar medium that the Voyager 2 probe is now entering. The chamber can &amp;quot;answer many questions about Mars or other related planetary bodies, both from scientific and technology points of view,&amp;quot; says Jesus Sobrado, the scientist in charge of Marte&amp;#039;s technical development. And it will give engineers a little more comfort that their spacecraft can handle whatever is coming. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a10285/the-lab-that-can-simulate-a-martian-storm-16630979/>