Unprecedented audio recordings made by NASA’s Perseverance rover transport us to the surface of the red planet, allowing us to hear the sound of a gentle alien breeze and the click of lasers blasting a Martian rock.
We are exactly three weeks away from the Perseverance mission, so they are still first. The project is in the deployment phase, the Mars 2020 team systematically deploys each of the rover’s many instruments to make sure they work properly and are configured for the scientific phase of the mission. Perseverance will spend the next two or more years exploring Jezero Crater, so you don’t have to hurry.
The team recently launched the rover with the right name SuperCam, in a first showcase of the enormous potential of the instrument. Attached to the rover mast, the weight of 12 pounds (5.4–kilograms) SuperCam can perform five different types of geological analysis, allowing the team to select the best rocks for sampling.
These explorations are important from a geological perspective, but also from an astrobiological perspective. The rocks in Jezero Crater — an ancient lake — may contain fossils or other biomarkers indicative of ancient microbial life. While the key goal of continuity Curiosity mission was to determine if Mars was ever habitable (apparently era), the Perseverance rover is really looking for evidence of ancient aliens (to be clear, habitability is different from habitat; it is possible that once Mars has fostered living conditions, this does not mean that life is rooted in the red planet).
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The SuperCam instrument was developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a consortium of French laboratories led by the Center National d’Etudes Spatiales. The first SuperCam data packet was recently received at the control center of the French Space Agency in Toulouse, seconds to a NASA statement. Recently released SuperCam images show a pair of rocks, called Yeehgo and Máaz, with exquisite detail.
“It’s amazing to see SuperCam work so well on Mars,” said Roger Wiens, SuperCam’s lead researcher in the statement. “When we first dreamed of this instrument eight years ago, we were worried that we were too ambitious. Now he’s up there working like a charm. “
Perseverance is also unique in that it is able to record sounds on Mars. NASA has provided three different audio samples, which include the first acoustic recording of laser shots on Mars and the sound of Martian winds.
Perseverance recorded the sounds of the laser at a distance of 3 feet (10 feet) from the target rock. The click sounds produced by laser pulses vary, allowing scientists to infer various physical characteristics of the target, such as hardness.
“The SuperCam really offers our rover eyes to see promising rock samples and ears to hear how it sounds when lasers hit them,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, associate science administrator at NASAbased in Washington, DC, to the statement. “This information will be essential in determining which samples we will cache and eventually return to Earth through our innovative Mars sample return campaign, which will be one of the most ambitious feats in the world. humanity has never done. “
He future mission Zurbuchen refers to it as being quite historical, as samples stored in Perseverance’s cache would represent the first Martian materials returned to Earth for analysis.
The Mars 2020 team has also released and received data from the rover’s visible and infrared sensor, one of the SuperCam sensors. This instrument collects reflected sunlight, exposing the mineral content of rocks and sediments.
SuperCam ‘s Raman spectrometer it also produces data, a success that now represents the first time spectroscopy is done in a different place on Earth, Olivier Beyssac, director of research at the CNRS at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry in Paris, said in a statement from NASA. Raman spectroscopy works by shooting light (specifically green laser beams) at an objective object, such as a rock. This non-destructive technique shows how light interacts with the chemical bonds of the target, providing information about the chemical structure of the object, internal stress levels, and other information.
“Raman spectroscopy will play a crucial role in characterizing minerals to gain a deeper insight into the geological conditions in which they formed and to detect potential organic molecules and minerals that could have been formed by living organisms,” Beyssac said. .
Looking to the future, the Mars 2020 team will continue to test the rover’s driving capabilities (it already is clocked 21.3 feet [6.5 meters]) and choose an airfield from which you want to deploy the Ingenuity helicopter.