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

[Ron Baalke]

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