The Curiosity rover successfully test fired a powerful laser at a nearby rock Sunday, blasting it with rapid-fire million-watt pulses that vaporized the outer layers for spectroscopic analysis.
A rock near the Curiosity rover, dubbed "Coronation," was the first target for the mobile science lab's ChemCam laser. The laser beam vaporized a tiny area of the rock, creating a visible plasma that was telescopically studied by the instrument's three spectrometers to determine its composition.
(Credit: NASA)
The Chemistry and Camera instrument, known as ChemCam, hit the target rock, dubbed "Coronation," with 30 pulses of laser light over 10 seconds, according to a NASA update. Each pulse lasted about five one-billionths of a second.
The laser beam created a visible spark of electrically charged plasma that was then observed by the instrument's telescope. The telescope, mounted on Curiosity's camera mast, fed the light through optical fibers to three spectrometers designed to record 6,144 different wavelengths of infrared, visible and ultraviolet light.
In a before-and-after image released by NASA, a tiny spot could be seen in an 8-millimeter by 8-millimeter inset that showed exactly where the laser beam hit.
"We got a great spectrum of Coronation, lots of signal," Roger Wiens, the ChemCam principal investigator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a NASA s... [Read more]
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