Power Draw and Space Probe Science

[-ctn-]

Hello everyone!

I'm working on a project and I was hoping to find out the amount of energy used by different types of sensors and instruments on rovers/probes, ect.

Despite all my frustrated googling, I still cannot find the answers I am looking for. I thought maybe some people on here would know or know where to point me. I was hoping to find out how much electricity is needed (in watt-hours, mAh, whatever unit, really) is needed to run an experiment on different devices, such as:

An Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer, like the ones on the MER rovers and Sojourner.

Curiosity's ChemCam.

A Gas Chromatographer (any model, really)

Accelerometers (Do these run all the time?)

Ect. Literally the only hard number I could find was basically "it takes 1.5 watts to run ChemCam" which I am very suspicious of.

Anybody know where to look? Or how to find out these numbers?

Thanks!

[Newt]

I could potentially ask some people who work on those things, but they are more on the sciencey end than the engineering one.

For MER, this site has distilled some information from seemingly reputable, and linked, sources. For power, the slide show the data comes from is pre-mission, so it may have changed.

Having some difficulty finding good things freely available for MSL, although this paper talks about the engineering cameras, citing the navcams at 2.15W power drain each.

Do you have access to major journals where this sort of thing might be published, as through a University? If other resources are available to you, google is seldom the best means to search for this sort of technical information. I am more familiar with how to get science than engineering articles, but if you have access, I would be willing to look through some such sources, to see what I can find.

[-ctn-]

Thank you! That information should be sufficient.

[impwarhamer]

out of interest, what is said project?

[-ctn-]

A) Future mods for KSP

a short film partly inspired by KSP that I'm producing later this year. It follows two rovers on the surface of Titan, and I was trying to find the wattage necessary to run systems so I can calculate what size batteries and RTG they would need, since that also influences the look of the design. Link to our Facebook page is in my sig - the film is called AATLAS.

Ps - if you know anybody with an interest of experience with robotics or Arduino, please feel free to get me into contact with them.