A Look Inside JPL’s DUSTIE Planetary Simulation Chamber

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A Look Inside JPL's DUSTIE Planetary Simulation Chamber

This wine barrel-size chamber at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California is used to simulate the temperatures and air pressure of other planets – in this case, the carbon dioxide ice found on the southern hemisphere of Mars. The experiment shown here simulated how Martian spider-like formations called araneiform terrain are created.

Called the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE, the chamber was used to test a prototype of a rasping tool designed for NASA's Phoenix lander, which touched down on Mars' northern hemisphere in 2008.

Copyright(c) 2009- NASA/JPL California Institute of Technology. Multimission Image Processing Lab All rights reserved. U.S. Government sponsorship is acknowledged.