AUPE:An Emulator for the ExoMars PanCam Instrument

The European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission will be the first European-led planetary rover mission and much preparation and rehearsal is required, both for the personnel involved and the data processing pipelines and analysis software. The long instrument development cycle and significant cost associated with flight hardware prohibits their use for extensive field deployment and testing and so emulator systems are required. For this reason an emulator for the PanCam camera system was developed using commercial off-the-shelf components. PanCam’s multispectral imaging capabilities will be used to guide the rover to sites of scientific interest, and development of this emulator and the associated data processing techniques are proving invaluable in ensuring the visual-based data products provided to scientists are accurate and that their processing is a transparent and traceable proces