MEDA Instrument Processing and Data Management for the Mars2020 Mission

This paper describes the MEDA instrument and its different subsystems, including the proposed data management architecture (hardware and software) supporting MEDA data acquisition, storage, processing and transmission. Mission planning and operations are based on Observation Tables that allow the instrument to operate completely autonomously during the mission (i.e. even when the rover computers are off) while retaining flexibility to accommodate additional observation opportunities that may appear during the mission, e.g. in case of areas of special interest, extra power, unused communication bandwidth, etc.