Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser for the first time on Mars on Aug. 19.Using the mission's Chemistry and Camera instrument or ChemCam, Curiosity hit the fist-sized rock called "Coronation" with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period.
According to a NASA report, each pulse delivered more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second. The report also states that the technique used by ChemCam is called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy in which the energy delivered by the instrument turns atoms from the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma, and helps NASA determine the rock's composition.
"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!"
While Curiosity's first blast was originally meant to be a "target practice", the data found as a consequence was even better and surprised researchers.
"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."
Launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Nov. 26, 2011, it is now two weeks since NASA's Curiosity rover touched Mars' surface. Rover is a $2.5 billion dream machine and is on a two-year mission to find out the evidence of past existence of life, water, and sources of energy and carbon on the Red Planet, the US space agency informed.
