[meteorite-list] Laser Instrument on Curiosity Mars Rover Tops 100, 000 Zaps

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2013 12:31:33 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201312052031.rB5KVX6L002286_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-351

Laser Instrument on NASA Mars Rover Tops 100,000 Zaps
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
December 05, 2013

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has passed the milestone of 100,000 shots
fired by its laser. It uses the laser as one way to check which chemical
elements are in rocks and soils.

The 100,000th shot was one of a series of 300 to investigate 10 locations
on a rock called "Ithaca" in late October, at a distance of 13 feet, 3
inches (4.04 meters) from the laser and telescope on rover's mast. The
Chemistry and Camera instrument (ChemCam) uses the infrared laser to excite
material in a pinhead-size spot on the target into a glowing, ionized
gas, called plasma. ChemCam observes that spark with the telescope and
analyzes the spectrum of light to identify elements in the target.

"Passing 100,000 laser shots is terribly exciting and is providing a remarkable
set of chemical data for Mars," said ChemCam co-investigator Horton Newsom
of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

As of the start of December, ChemCam has fired its laser on Mars more
than 102,000 times, at more than 420 rock or soil targets. Virtually every
shot yields a spectrum of data returned to Earth. Most targets get zapped
at several points with 30 laser pulses at each point. The instrument has
also returned more than 1,600 images taken by its remote micro-imager
camera.

An international team of scientists and students is mining information
from ChemCam to document the diversity or materials on the surface inside
Mars' Gale Crater and the geological processes that formed them. "These
materials include dust, wind-blown soil, water-lain sediments derived
from the crater rim, veins of sulfates and igneous rocks that may be ejecta
from other parts of Mars," Newsom said.

Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five
one-billionths of a second. The technique used by ChemCam, called laser-induced
breakdown spectroscopy, has been used to assess composition of targets
in other extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on
the sea floor. Experimental applications have included environmental monitoring
and cancer detection. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project, using the
Curiosity rover, is the first mission to use it on another planet.

ChemCam is one of 10 instruments in Curiosity's science payload. The U.S.
Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M.,
developed ChemCam in partnership with scientists and engineers funded
by the French national space agency, CNES, the University of Toulouse
and research agency, CNRS. The laser was built by Thales, Paris. More
information about ChemCam is available at http://www.msl-chemcam.com .

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.jpl.nasa.gov/msl
, 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 .

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov

2013-351
Received on Thu 05 Dec 2013 03:31:33 PM PST