[meteorite-list] Rover's Laser Instrument Zaps First Martian Rock

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2012 17:58:27 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201208200058.q7K0wRHT025366_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-248

Rover's Laser Instrument Zaps First Martian Rock
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
August 19, 2012

Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Mission Status Report

PASADENA, Calif. - Today, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser
for the first time on Mars, using the beam from a science instrument to
interrogate a fist-size rock called "Coronation."

The mission's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, hit the
fist-sized rock with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period.
Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five
one-billionths of a second.

The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized,
glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light from that spark with a
telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about
what elements are in the target.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation -- lots of signal," said ChemCam
Principal Investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory,
N.M. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the
results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!"

ChemCam recorded spectra from the laser-induced spark at each of the 30
pulses. The goal of this initial use of the laser on Mars was to serve
as target practice for characterizing the instrument, but the activity
may provide additional value. Researchers will check whether the
composition changed as the pulses progressed. If it did change, that
could indicate dust or other surface material being penetrated to reveal
different composition beneath the surface. The spectrometers record
intensity at 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and
infrared light.

"It's surprising that the data are even better than we ever had during
tests on Earth, in signal-to-noise ratio," said ChemCam Deputy Project
Scientist Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en
Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. "It's so rich,
we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands
of targets with ChemCam in the next two years."

The technique used by ChemCam, called laser-induced breakdown
spectroscopy, has been used to determine composition of targets in other
extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on the sea
floor, and has had experimental applications in environmental monitoring
and cancer detection. Today's investigation of Coronation is the first
use of the technique in interplanetary exploration.

Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago, beginning a two-year mission
using 10 instruments to assess whether a carefully chosen study area
inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable
for microbial life.

ChemCam was developed, built and tested by the U.S. Department of
Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with scientists
and engineers funded by the French national space agency, Centre
National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and research agency, Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute
of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project,
including Curiosity, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
JPL designed and built the rover.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl
and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/. You can follow the mission on
Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at:
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.

More information about ChemCam is available at http://www.msl-chemcam.com.

Guy Webster/D.C. Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.Webster at jpl.nasa.gov / Agle at jpl.nasa.gov

2012-248
Received on Sun 19 Aug 2012 08:58:27 PM PDT