Showing posts with label CHEMCAM LASER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CHEMCAM LASER. Show all posts

Sunday, December 8, 2013

CHEMCAM EXCEEDS 100.000 SHOTS ON MARS

Curiosity Heads To Mars.  Credit:  NASA
FROM:  LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Los Alamos’s ChemCam team fills scrapbook from Mars road trip

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Dec. 5, 2013—The ChemCam laser instrument aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover fired its 100,000th shot recently, chronicling its adventures on Mars with a coffee-table-book’s worth of spectral data that might rival snapshots gathered during a long and satisfying family vacation here on Earth. ChemCam zaps rocks with a high-powered laser to determine their composition and carries a camera that can survey the Martian landscape.

“ChemCam has greatly exceeded our expectations,” said Roger Wiens, Los Alamos National Laboratory planetary scientist and Principal Investigator of the ChemCam Team. “The information we’ve gleaned from the instrument will continue to enhance our understanding of the Red Planet, and will nicely complement information from the other nine instruments aboard Curiosity as we continue our odyssey to Mount Sharp.”

Curiosity landed on Mars at the edge of Gale Crater near the base of Mount Sharp on Aug. 6, 2012. The rover is a rolling laboratory about the size of a small SUV that will roam the Martian landscape for at least another year in search of clues about the planet’s habitability. Using a suite of 10 instruments that can perform diverse and amazing tasks ranging from digging up and baking soil samples, to shooting rocks with pinpoint accuracy with a high-powered laser, Curiosity already has helped show scientists that Mars apparently once had a very wet history and still retains enough moisture in its dust and rocks to quench the thirst of future astronauts.

Curiosity’s laser instrument, ChemCam, fires a short laser burst that packs the wallop of nearly one million light bulbs into a single pinpoint of light to vaporize rock and dust. A camera aboard the instrument reads the spectral signature of the resultant flash and translates the information into the composition of whatever happened to be in ChemCam’s crosshairs at the moment. The instrument also has a camera that scientists have been using to survey the Martian landscape.

The ChemCam concept was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, but the instrument aboard Curiosity is a partnership between Los Alamos and the French national space agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and research agency, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

The U.S. operations center for the ChemCam team is located in downtown Los Alamos. Wiens said a teleprompter showing the latest slideshows from Mars will soon be erected in downtown Los Alamos for public viewing.

“Like those family slideshows from summer vacations along Route 66, people will be able to enjoy and experience the highlights of our trip,” Wiens said. “ChemCam was designed to fire one million shots, so we’ll have lots of stories to tell later on.”

Saturday, August 18, 2012

CURIOSITY LASER READIES FOR MARTIAN TARGETS

FROM: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
RIGHT:  Chem Cam Calibration PreLaunch.  PHOTO CREDIT: Los Alamos National Laboratory
ChemCam Laser Sets its Sights on First Martian Target
Rock zapper ready after beaming back images of calibration targets

LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, August 17, 2012—Members of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover ChemCam team have received the first photos from the instrument’s remote micro imager. The successful capture of ChemCam’s first 10 photos sets the stage for the first test bursts of the instrument’s rock-zapping laser in the near future.
 
"The successful delivery of these photos means we can begin efforts in earnest for the first images of Mars rocks by the ChemCam instrument and the first use of the instrument’s laser," said Los Alamos National Laboratory planetary scientist Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator of the ChemCam Team. "We anticipate these next steps over the weekend."
 
The next tasks for ChemCam—the inaugural laser burst and spectral reading—will help scientists determine the integrity of the ChemCam system and the pointing capability of the rover’s mast, which supports ChemCam’s laser and telescope. Scientists and engineers from NASA’s Curiosity rover mission have selected ChemCam’s first target, a three-inch rock designated N-165 located near the rover.
 
"Rock N-165 looks like your typical Mars rock, about three inches (seven centimeters) wide and it's about 10 feet away," Wiens said. "We are going to hit it with 14 milliJoules of energy 30 times in 10 seconds. It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, but it should be pretty cool too."
 
The ChemCam system is one of 10 instruments mounted on the MSL mission’s Curiosity rover—a six-wheeled mobile laboratory that will roam more than 12 miles of the planet’s surface during the course of one Martian year (98 Earth weeks).
 
When ChemCam fires its extremely powerful laser pulse, it briefly focuses the energy of a million light bulbs onto an area the size of a pinhead. The laser blast vaporizes a small amount of its target up to seven meters (23 feet) away.
 
The resultant flash of glowing plasma is viewed by the system’s 4.3-inch aperture telescope, which sends the light down an optical fiber to a spectrometer located in the body of the rover. There the colors of the light from the flash are recorded, enabling scientists to determine the elemental composition of the vaporized material. ChemCam also has a high-resolution camera that provides close-up images of an analyzed location. It can image a human hair from seven feet away.
 
The ChemCam system is designed to capture as many as 14,000 observations throughout the mission.
 
The laser, telescope, and camera were provided by the French space agency, CNES, while the spectrometers, electronics, and software were built at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which leads the investigation. The spectrometers were developed with the aid of Ocean Optics, Incorporated, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory assisted with various aspects of development.

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