Unprecedented sound recordings taken by NASA’s Perseverance Rover transport us to the surface of the Red Planet, allowing us to hear the sound of a gentle strange breeze and the click-click of lasers slamming a Mars rock.
We’re exactly three weeks into the Perseverance Mission, so it’s still early days. The project is in the implementation phase, with the Mars 2020 team systematically using each of the Rover’s instruments to make sure they are working properly and set up for the scientific phase of the mission. Perseverance will explore Jezero Crater for the next two years or more, so there is no need to rush things.
The team recently rolled out the appropriate name of the Rover SuperCam, in an early display of the tremendous potential of the instrument. The 12 pounds (5.4–kilogram) SuperCam can perform five different types of geological analyzes, allowing the team to select the best rocks for sampling.
These explorations are important from a geological perspective, but also from an astrobiological perspective. Rocks in the Jezero crater – a former lake – may contain fossils or other biomarkers indicating earlier microbial life. While the main purpose of the ongoing Curiosity mission had to determine whether Mars was once habitable (apparently wash), the Perseverance Rover is actually looking for evidence of ancient aliens (to be clear, habitability is different from inhabited; Mars may have once cultivated the living conditions, but that does not mean that life actually took place on 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 data package from SuperCam was recently received at the French Center’s Control Center in Toulouse, according to to a NASA statement. Newly released SuperCam images show some rocks, named Yeehgo and Máaz, in excellent detail.
“It’s amazing to see SuperCam work so well on Mars,” Roger Wiens, the chief investigator for SuperCam, said in the statement. ‘When we first dreamed of the instrument eight years ago, we were worried that we were far too ambitious. Now it works like a charm. ‘
Perseverance is also unique because it is capable of recording sounds on Mars. NASA provided three different sound samples, and it contains the first acoustic recording of laser recordings on Mars, and the sound of Mars winds.
Perseverance recorded the laser sounds at a distance of 3.1 meters from the target rock. The clicking sounds produced by the laser pulses vary, allowing scientists to deduce different physical properties of the target, such as hardness.
“SuperCam really gives our rover eyes to see promising rock samples and ears to hear what it sounds like when the lasers hit them,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, co-administrator of science at NASA h.headquartered in Washington, DC, in the statement. “This information is essential for determining the monsters to put in the closet and eventually return to Earth through our groundbreaking Mars Sample Return campaign, which will be one of the most ambitious achievements mankind has ever made. has.”
The future mission Zurbuchen refers would be quite historical, as the samples stored by Perseverance would be the first Martian material returned to Earth for analysis.
The Mars 2020 team also imported and received data from the Rover’s visible and infrared sensor, one of the SuperCam sensors. This instrument collects reflected sunlight and exposes the mineral content of rocks and sediments.
SuperCam ‘s Raman spectrometer also delivers data, an achievement that now represents for the first time that spectroscopy is done somewhere other than the earth, Olivier Beyssac, CNRS research director at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry in Paris, pointed this out in the NASA statement. Raman spectroscopy works by shooting light – specifically green laser beams – at a target object, such as a rock. This non-destructive technique demonstrates how light interacts with chemical bonds in the target, and provides information on the chemical structure of the object, internal levels of stress, and other information.
“Raman spectroscopy is going to play a crucial role in the characterization of minerals to gain deeper insight into the geological conditions under which they were formed and to detect potential organic and mineral molecules that can be formed by living organisms,” Beyssac said. said.
Looking ahead, the Mars 2020 team will continue to test the driver’s capabilities (this is already clocked 21.3 feet [6.5 meters]), and select an airfield to harness the Ingenuity helicopter.