Friday, August 24, 2012

Curiosity Zaps A Rock

A laser has been fired on the planet named for the Roman god of war.

The Curiosity rover used a laser to hit a nearby rock.  The pulses of pure energy, ten of them, vaporized a tiny bit of the rock so that the telescope of the rover's ChemCam could take a spectrograph of the vapor.  Analysis of the spectrograph should reveal the composition of the rock.

It might be slightly more complex than that, however.  Mission scientists think the laser might have also vaporized wind-blown dust that happened to be on the rock.  If that in fact occurred, the spectrographic signatures of the dust and the rock will have to be disentangled.

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