CaltechAUTHORS
Published December 2020 | Version public
Journal Article Metadata-only

PIXL: Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 2. ROR icon University of Washington
  • 3. ROR icon Stony Brook University
  • 4. ROR icon Moxtek (United States)
  • 5. ROR icon Technical University of Denmark
  • 6. ROR icon University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
  • 7. ROR icon Space Science Institute
  • 8. ROR icon Queensland University of Technology
  • 9. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 10. ROR icon X-ray Instrumentation Associates (United States)
  • 11. ROR icon Texas A&M University
  • 12. ROR icon Lunar and Planetary Institute

Abstract

Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is a micro-focus X-ray fluorescence spectrometer mounted on the robotic arm of NASA's Perseverance rover. PIXL will acquire high spatial resolution observations of rock and soil chemistry, rapidly analyzing the elemental chemistry of a target surface. In 10 seconds, PIXL can use its powerful 120 μm-diameter X-ray beam to analyze a single, sand-sized grain with enough sensitivity to detect major and minor rock-forming elements, as well as many trace elements. Over a period of several hours, PIXL can autonomously raster-scan an area of the rock surface and acquire a hyperspectral map comprised of several thousand individual measured points. When correlated to a visual image acquired by PIXL's camera, these maps reveal the distribution and abundance variations of chemical elements making up the rock, tied accurately to the physical texture and structure of the rock, at a scale comparable to a 10X magnifying geological hand lens. The many thousands of spectra in these postage stamp-sized elemental maps may be analyzed individually or summed together to create a bulk rock analysis, or subsets of spectra may be summed, quantified, analyzed, and compared using PIXLISE data analysis software. This hand lens-scale view of the petrology and geochemistry of materials at the Perseverance landing site will provide a valuable link between the larger, centimeter- to meter-scale observations by Mastcam-Z, RIMFAX and Supercam, and the much smaller (micron-scale) measurements that would be made on returned samples in terrestrial laboratories.

Additional Information

© 2020 Springer. Received 26 June 2020; Accepted 09 November 2020; Published 19 November 2020. This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). The authors gratefully acknowledge two anonymous reviewers for their helpful contributions.

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
106870
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20201202-071232725

Funding

NASA/JPL/Caltech
NASA
80NM0018D0004

Dates

Created
2020-12-02
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-16
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)