Published on Sep 28, 2024
The objective:
The objectve was to ground-truth THEMIS an infrared spectrometer on the Mars orbiter Odyssey. To see if you could find out the size and composition of rocks using thermal inertia.
I choose 12 different kinds of rocks for the study. I then took 10 readings with a infrared thermomiter for each rock in the field. Then I took on bag home of each kind of rock to test the thermal inertia.
I then put a little bit of each kind of rock in a plastic contanier a put it in the freezer over night. The next morning I took the rocks out and took five readings of each rock every 15 minutes to deturmine the thermal inertia. I then repeated that exparament for an oven to test the thermal inertia of the cooling down of rocks.
The size had a major part in determining the thermal inertia. The smaller the rock the the less thermal inertia it had. compositon also made a little bit of difference.
On the basis of my results i found out that THEMIS is trust worthy, But THEMIS was looking at bigger ranges of the sizes of rocks.
This project is to test the thermal inertia of different kinds of rocks to tell if THEMIS's approach was based on solid work.