When astronauts land again on the surface of another world, their limited resources will allow for a short window of time each day to explore their new surroundings. Instruments designed to quickly reveal the terrain’s chemistry and form will help them understand the environments around them and how they change over time.

To protect precious hours available for extraterrestrial scientific investigations, a team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland — the Goddard Instrument Field Team (GIFT) — is testing and refining the chemical-analyzing and land-surveying tools that will assist future human explorers of places like the Moon and Mars.

“It takes a long time to develop technologies that are going to fly to other planetary bodies,” said Kelsey Evans Young, a geologist at Goddard who helps develop space-exploration tools. “What we’re doing right now has a direct implication for what instruments are going to be selected for future space flight.”

Curiosity uses a drill and scoop, located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered rocks. It then sieves and drops these samples into the portable chemistry lab, Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, built into its belly.

Credits: NASA

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Many of the technologies Young and her team develop build upon ones that have already equipped robotic orbiters and rovers that sniff out the cosmos. NASA’s Curiosity rover, for instance, which is currently traversing Gale Crater on Mars, is studying the composition of soil with the help of spectrometers, or tools that identify what rocks are made of by measuring how their chemical elements interact with electromagnetic radiation. On Earth, too, instruments that reveal the chemical makeup of objects are widely used in fields including art restoration, archaeology and geology.

Though the technologies powering these tools already exist, NASA’s objective is to make the instruments small and efficient enough to help robots, and one day astronauts, analyze on the spot the composition of the surface of planets, moons and asteroids. This will allow for quick adjustments to exploration plans, said Young, and well-informed decisions about which few precious samples explorers can afford to return to Earth on a spacecraft of limited size.

To test instruments, Young and other NASA scientists and engineers have the enviable responsibility of deploying to exotic locations on Earth that share characteristics with moons and planets. These analog sites include out-of-this world landscapes such as the Potrillo volcanic field in south-central New Mexico. There, the desert geology that was shaped over millions of years by Earth’s volcanic and tectonic forces closely resembles our Moon’s. This is why Potrillo has served as a geology training ground for astronauts dating back to the Apollo era.

Another popular analog destination is the area around the active Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, where lava cools to form basaltic rocks similar to those on Mars. Early in its history, the Red Planet had giant, active volcanoes, bigger than any on Earth. Studying the impact of fresh lava on Kīlauea, and comparing that to what we know about the geologic conditions of the far-away past, helps scientists understand how Martian volcanoes may have shaped that planet, and even the geology of the rocky bodies that make up our solar system.