MOMA GC-MS Coupling

International audience; The goals of the joint ESA-Roscosmos Exo-Mars-2018 rover mission is to search for “signsof life” molecules (large, non-volatile organ-ic or biological molecules that suggest existing or prior biosynthetic activity) on the Martian surface and near subsurface and to distinguish between the endogenous and exogenous sources of Martian organics.The Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) aboard the ExoMars rover will be a key analytical tool in providing chemical (molecular) information from the solid samples, with particular focus on the charac-terization of organic content. Central to MOMA in-strumentation is a gas chromatograph-mass spectrome-ter (GC-MS) which provides the unique ability to characterize a broad range of compounds allowing chemical analyses of volatile and non-volatile species.Both instruments have been tested separately first and have been coupled in order to test the efficiency of the future MOMA GC-MS instrument.