Roland continues, “The team is very proud of what we have managed to achieve. EMS was developed not only as a cutting-edge scientific instrument, but also as a technology demonstrator, and back in 2020 we defined our success criteria for the mission in line with this. Therefore, what we have achieved today – developing the spectrometer in half the typical time, delivering our instrument to NASA after successful qualification for flight in 2021, followed by the recent successful checkout of the instrument in orbit – constitutes more than 90% of our project’s goals.”

Simeon Barber, the EMS Principal Investigator at The Open University, agrees. “The successful development of EMS opens new opportunities for our instrument. With EMS as a proven instrument concept, we are very well positioned for future flight opportunities, not only on landers but also on lunar rovers.”

“The success of EMS is also a testament of the good collaboration between the space agencies, industry and academia,” says Chris Howe, the EMS lead engineer at RAL Space. “The short development time would not have been possible without an efficient and trustful working relationship between those entities.”

The PITMS instrument is a collaboration between ESA and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where ESA and its contractors, The Open University and RAL Space, provided the Exospheric Mass Spectrometer at the heart of the instrument.