The Mars Rover Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago and yesterday it tested for the first time its laser on a fist-sized rock called Coronation.
Among the instruments of the Mars Rover Curiosity there’s the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam), a laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) system, which means that it allows quantitative and qualitative analyzes studying the optical spectrum emitted by the plasma generated by a laser beam hitting a sample.
In essence, the ChemCam struck the rock with thirty one-megawatt five nanoseconds each laser pulses within ten seconds, as a consequence the atoms of the rock that were hit were turned into ionized plasma that emits light. The ChemCam recorded this light in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared light for a total of 6,144 wavelengths and examined it with its three spectrometers to obtain information on the elements contained in the rock.
The image shows the Coronation rock with a magnification that show is before the test in the circle and the detail of the part affected by the ChemCam laser in the square with a further magnification.
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The ChemCam was developed and built over eight years by the Los Alamos National Laboratory with the French government agency in charge of space activities, the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), and French research center Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). This type of system had a remarkable development in the last decade and has been used to investigate extreme environments ranging from the inside of nuclear reactors to the bottom of the seas. The Mars Rover Curiosity’s ChemCam is the first application of this technology in the exploration of another planet.
The scientists who work with the ChemCam said they were very satisfied with the results of this first test, from which they obtained data even better than the tests on Earth. This means that we can expect great results from the use of ChemCam during the two Earth years of the Mars Rover Curiosity’s mission.
In fact, there are thousands of possible targets for the ChemCam during the journey that the Mars Rover Curiosity is about to start to reach Mount Sharp. I’s another part of the mission that’s just beginning.
