It has been less than a calendar month since NASA ’s Perseverance has land on Mars but during this metre the rover has been busy test its instrument , startingmoving about , and takingincredible photos . Now , it has also start out its science mission and the first data has been institutionalise back to Earth .
The first results come from its incredibleSuperCam , its 5 - in-1 instrument key to the search for ancient microbial liveliness that Perseverance will undertake . The 5.6 - kilogram ( 12 - pound ) camera first measurements included observations in infrared and visible light of John Rock illuminated by the Sun . It also admit observations with the Raman spectrometer . The bird of passage photograph a immature optical maser ( you could tick off how it soundedhere ) at a rock’n’roll called Máaz that was 3.1 meters ( 10 feet ) away . This energise the chemical bonds in the mineral and could be detected by the SuperCam legal instrument .
“ This is the first prison term an instrument has used Raman spectroscopy anywhere other than on Earth ! sOlivier Beyssac , CNRS research director at the Institut de Minéralogie , de Physique des Matériaux et de Cosmochimie in Paris , say in astatement . “ Raman spectroscopy is perish to play a all-important function in qualify minerals to derive deeper insight into the geologic conditions under which they formed and to detect possible organic and mineral molecules that might have been formed by populate organisms . ”
SuperCam is a joint intersection of Los Alamos National Laboratory ( LANL ) in New Mexico and a pool of Gallic inquiry laboratories under the auspex of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales ( CNES ) , and it is now functioning on a different satellite .
“ It is awful to see SuperCam influence so well on Mars , ” said Roger Wiens , the principal investigator for Perseverance ’s SuperCam instrument from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico . “ When we first stargaze up this instrument eight days ago , we worried that we were being right smart too challenging . Now it is up there working like a charm . ”
The SuperCam is not only a optical maser and a creature for study stone at a space . The pawn is also designed to identify which types of rocks and soil might nurse hint of past microbial life , it can study the atmosphere and even estimate if the martian dust might pose a danger to future human spaceman .
