Brimrose to Develop Sophisticated Sensing Instrument for NASA

JOEL WILLIAMS, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
joel.williams@photonics.com

NASA has selected Brimrose Technology Corporation (BTC) to provide a sophisticated sensing technology to search for materials on the moons and planets of our solar system. The winning proposal is for the development of CIMMOS, a compact, integrated, modular, multitechnology optical sensing instrument capable of providing detailed spectroscopic information.

The CIMMOS selection is in addition to four Brimrose spectrometers that have been selected to search for water crystals on Earth’s moon in upcoming moon missions.

“CIMMOS is designed to probe the ice surface and shallow subsurface of icy moons,” said BTC senior scientist and principal investigator Clayton Yang. “Deployed on an ocean world exploration lander, CIMMOS can rapidly characterize minerals, salts, and organics on the surface, as well as the have the ability to resolve profiles greater than one centimeter beneath the surface to understand diagenetic alteration.”

The device will be compatible with a lander or rover drill, Yang said, and will be able to study deposits at the bottom of a drilled hole up to 10 cm deep and to identify substances at distances of up to 7 m.

The system brings together five optical spectroscopic technologies: near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (expandable to MWIR); visible reflectance spectroscopy; Raman spectroscopy; UV-visible-NIR (UVN) laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS); and LIBS with the additional capability of mid-IR LIBS emission spectroscopy. “Our groundbreaking development of mid-IR LIBS introduces to planetary science unprecedented real-time and in situ molecular analysis of the composition and profile of samples that would be intractable using standard mid-infrared emission and reflection spectroscopy,” Yang told Photonics Media.

CIMMOS for field applications is also capable of overcoming the limitation of lab-based mid-IR emission spectroscopy to provide molecular structure analysis that uses all three major vibrational spectroscopy techniques: mid-infrared, near-IR, and Raman, Yang said.

Beyond its applications in the study of icy moons and planets, CIMMOS could be used in pharmaceutical, security and defense, mining, environmental, and metallurgy applications, Yang said.