The performance of melting probes under Mars surface conditions
This report deals with the performance of melting probes under Mars surface conditions. Such probes have been proposed in the past by NASA for a dedicated Mars polar mission in order to explore the vertical layering of the Martian polar regions. The scientific background is that these layers are expected to contain a lot of information about climate changes on Mars in its geological past.
At IWF a melting probe was developed and built in the frame of an ESA contract in the years 2006-2009. However, the melting probes developed and tested at that time never worked in a satisfactory way and the reasons for this remained obscure (too low power, too low pressure?).
This was the motivation to reconsider the problem in 2016/17 with two refurbished probes, which were less complex than the final prototype from the ESA project, but more robust. Different from the earlier tests, which mainly had the conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa in mind, we performed the recent experiments mostly under Mars pressure and in a temperature range suitable for Mars.
The results are reported in this seminar and parts of them have been published in the recent paper Kömle N.I., Tiefenbacher P., Weiss P., Bendiukova A.: Melting probes revisited - Ice penetration experiments under Mars surface pressure conditions, Icarus, doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2017.08.006.
With these experiments we have proven that at least on Mars melting probes would work as theoretically expected and thus (though with a higher technical effort than original proposals estimated) could be used to explore the subsurface layers of the Martian polar ice in the frame of a future planetary mission.