• DOI:10.1007/s11214-020-00767-7
• Corpus ID: 229416825

PIXL: Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry

@article{Allwood2020PIXLPI,
  title={PIXL: Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry},
  author={Abigail C. Allwood and Lawrence A. Wade and Marc Christopher Foote and William T. Elam and Joel A. Hurowitz and Steven J. Battel and Douglas E. Dawson and Robert W. Denise and Eric M. Ek and Martin S. Gilbert and Matthew E. King and Carl Christian Liebe and Todd W. Parker and David Arge Klevang Pedersen and David Randall and Robert F. Sharrow and Michael E. Sondheim and George Allen and Kenneth E. Arnett and Mitchell H. Au and Christophe Basset and Mathias Benn and John C. Bousman and David F. Braun and Robert J. Calvet and Benton C. Clark and Luca Cinquini and Sterling Conaby and Henry A. Conley and Scott Davidoff and Jenna Delaney and Troelz Denver and Ernesto Diaz and Gary B. Doran and Joan Ervin and Michael Evans and David Flannery and Ning Gao and Johannes Gross and John P. Grotzinger and Brett Hannah and Jackson T. Harris and Cathleen M. Harris and Yejun He and Christopher M. Heirwegh and Christina Hernandez and Eric Hertzberg and Robert Hodyss and James R. Holden and Christopher Hummel and Matthew A. Jadusingh and John Leif J{\o}rgensen and Jonathan H. Kawamura and Amarit Kitiyakara and Kris J. Kozaczek and James L. Lambert and Peter Lawson and Yang Liu and Thomas S. Luchik and Kristen M. Macneal and S{\o}ren N{\o}rvang Madsen and Scott M. McLennan and Patrick J. McNally and Patrick M{\'e}ras and Richard E. Muller and James J. Napoli and Bret J. Naylor and Peter Nemere and Igor Yu. Ponomarev and Raul M. Perez and Napat Pootrakul and Raul A. Romero and Rogelio Rosas and Jared Sachs and Rembrandt T. Schaefer and Michael Schein and Timothy P. Setterfield and Vritika Singh and E. Young Song and Mary Soria and Paul C. Stek and Nicholas Ryan Tallarida and Donald R. Thompson and Michael M. Tice and Lars Timmermann and Violet Torossian and Allan H. Treiman and Shihchuan Tsai and Kyle Uckert and Juan Villalvazo and Mandy Wang and Daniel W. Wilson and Shana C. Worel and Payam Zamani and M. P. Zappe and Fang Zhong and Richard Zimmerman},
  journal={Space Science Reviews},
  year={2020},
  volume={216},
  pages={1-132}
}

• A. Allwood, L. Wade, +94 authors R. Zimmerman
• Published 1 December 2020
• Physics, Geology
• Space Science Reviews

Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is a micro-focus X-ray fluorescence spectrometer mounted on the robotic arm of NASA’s Perseverance rover. PIXL will acquire high spatial resolution observations of rock and soil chemistry, rapidly analyzing the elemental chemistry of a target surface. In 10 seconds, PIXL can use its powerful 120 μm-diameter X-ray beam to analyze a single, sand-sized grain with enough sensitivity to detect major and minor rock-forming elements, as well as many trace elements. Over a period of several hours, PIXL can autonomously raster-scan an area of the rock surface and acquire a hyperspectral map comprised of several thousand individual measured points. When correlated to a visual image acquired by PIXL’s camera, these maps reveal the distribution and abundance variations of chemical elements making up the rock, tied accurately to the physical texture and structure of the rock, at a scale comparable to a 10X magnifying geological hand lens. The many thousands of spectra in these postage stamp-sized elemental maps may be analyzed individually or summed together to create a bulk rock analysis, or subsets of spectra may be summed, quantified, analyzed, and compared using PIXLISE data analysis software. This hand lens-scale view of the petrology and geochemistry of materials at the Perseverance landing site will provide a valuable link between the larger, centimeter- to meter-scale observations by Mastcam-Z, RIMFAX and Supercam, and the much smaller (micron-scale) measurements that would be made on returned samples in terrestrial laboratories.