Planetary Surface Instruments Workshop

We identify the chemical elements and element ratios that should be analyzed to address many of the issues defined by COMPLEX. We determined that most of these issues require two chemically sensitive instruments to analyze the necessary complement of elements. In addition, it is useful in many cases to use one instrument to analyze the outermost planetary surface (e.g., to determine weathering effects), while a second is used to analyze a subsurface volume of material (e.g., to determine the composition of unaltered planetary surface material). This dual approach to chemical analyses will also facilitate the calibration of orbital and/or Earth-based spectral observations of the planetary body. We determined that in many cases the scientific issues defined by COMPLEX can only be fully addressed with combined packages of instruments that would supplement the chemical data with mineralogic or visual information.