Several factors must be considered to determine whether an area is suitable for Mars analog missions on Earth. First and foremost, the physical and geological characteristics of the terrain must be studied.  Therefore, soil and sediment samples from Armenia, collected during the preliminary exploration of possible AMADEE -24 Mars simulation areas, have now been investigated sediment-geologically.

The goal was to determine basic properties of the soil or sediment cover that are potentially relevant for the technical implementation of various experiments. These include the grain size and grain shape of the sediment particles, but also the mineralogical composition. From this information, we can already assess whether, for example, special precautions should be taken to protect sensitive equipment from fine dust, or whether we should expect increased material wear due to particularly hard, sharp-edged sediment grains.

The analyses were carried out by Dominik Jaeger, OeWF member and PhD student in Earth Sciences, in the laboratories of the Institute of Geology and the Institute of Mineralogy and Petrography at the University of Innsbruck. However, these investigations alone do not determine whether an area is suitable for an OeWF Mars analog mission; many other criteria play a role. These are described in our scientific publication „AMADEE-18 and the Analog Mission Performance Metrics Analysis: A Benchmarking Tool for Mission Planning and Evaluation.

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