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-click of lasers flying over a Martian rock.
We’re exactly three weeks into the Perseverance mission, so it’s still the first few days. The project is in the deployment phase, with the Mars 2020 team the systematic implementation of each of the rover’s many tools to ensure that it works properly and is configured for the scientific phase of the mission. Perseverance will spend the next two years or more exploring Jezero Crater, so you don’t have to rush things.
The team recently launched the rover with the right name Supercut, in an early showcase of the instrument’s huge potential. Attached to the 12-pound rover mast (5.4–kilogram) 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 – a former lake – may contain fossils or other biomarkers indicative of previous microbial life. Since the key objective of the deployment The mission of curiosity was to determine if Mars was ever habitable (it seems that was), the Perseverance rover is actually looking for evidence of ancient aliens (to be clear, habitability is different from inhabited; Mars may have once favored living conditions, but that doesn’t mean that life has taken root 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 packet from SuperCam was recently received at the control center of the French Space Agency in Toulouse, right to a NASA statement. The recently released SuperCam images show a pair of rocks, nicknamed Yeehgo and Máaz, in refined detail.
“It’s amazing to see SuperCam working so well on Mars,” Roger Wiens, chief investigator for SuperCam, said in a statement. “When we first dreamed of this instrument eight years ago, we were worried that we were far too ambitious. Now it works like a charm up there. “
Perseverance is also unique in that it is able to record sounds on Mars. NASA provided three different audio samples and these include the first acoustic recording of laser photos on Mars and the sound of Martian winds.
Perseverance recorded the sounds of the laser at a distance of 3.1 meters from the target rock. The click sounds produced by laser pulses vary, allowing scientists to deduce various physical characteristics of the target, such as hardness.
“SuperCam really offers our eyes to see promising rock samples and ears to hear what they sound like when they let go of their lasers,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate scientific administrator.headquartered in Washington, DC, in the statement. “This information will be essential when determining which samples will be hidden and finally return to Earth through our revolutionary campaign to return the sample to Mars, which will be one of the most ambitious deeds ever undertaken by humanity”.
future mission Zurbuchen refers to the fact that it will be quite historical, because the samples kept by Perseverance would represent the first Martian materials returned to Earth for analysis.
The Mars 2020 team launched and received data from 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 also produces data, an achievement that is now the first time spectroscopy has been performed elsewhere than Earth, Olivier Beyssac, director of CNRS research at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry in Paris, stressed in the NASA statement. Raman spectroscopy works by shooting light – especially green laser beams – at a target object, such as a stone. This non-destructive technique shows how light interacts with the chemical bonds in 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 and mineral molecules that could have formed from living organisms,” Beyssac said. .
Looking ahead, the Mars 2020 team will continue to test the rover’s driving capabilities (it already is clock 21.3 feet [6.5 meters]) and choose an airfield from which to launch the helicopter of ingenuity.