The Mars Terrain Simulator: a high level measurement facility in support to the ExoMars mission

The Mars Terrain Simulator (MTS) is an indoor analogue facility located in Turin at ALTEC premises, designed to reproduce, from a morphological and mineralogical point of view, the Mars terrain characteristics at the landing site and to support the daily ground operations through rehearsal and troubleshooting on representative hardware and instrumentation. The MTS is part of a wider ground control facility known as the Rover Operations Control Center (ROCC), where the operations of the ExoMars Rover will be monitored, commanded and controlled. Objectives of this paper are to describe the MTS facility and present two examples of test activities, part of a more complex test campaign that will be completed with the execution of the entire Rover functional test. The principal area with the Mars surface physical characteristics is the Arena, a 20x16 meters zone covered with two soils that provide different Rover wheels slippage conditions. The terrain can be adapted to create Mars soil features, such as dunes, crevasses, ramps or hills. These reconfigurations are performed using support equipment available in the facility. Slopes can be created using the Tilting Platform, an 8x8 meters mobile ramp tiltable up to 30 deg while crevasses are generated using ad-hoc devices. The Mars gravity is simulated using the Gravity Compensation Device. The drilling operations are executed outside the Main Arena on a defined zone, the Drilling Facility. The Rover cameras optical tests are executed inside the Illumination Facility, a 4x4 meters area located under the Drilling Facility. The Rover operations are monitored using two sets of cameras mounted around the Arena: 12 OptiTrack infrared cameras track the Rover motions, while 40 digital cameras generate a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). The output provided by these cameras allows also the reconfiguration of the terrain as the one detected by the Rover Panoramic Camera on Mars and, as consequence, to recreate the Rover contingency scenario inside the arena.