American-made ingenuity on Mars: Curiosity rover using lasers to examine rocks
NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, used a high-powered laser on Sunday to begin testing an instrument that measures the composition of rocks. The rover fired 30 laser pulses in 10 seconds at a small rock in order to analyze its contents.
Curiosity's Chemical and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, fires a laser pulses that last just five one-billionths of a second but deliver more than a million watts of power, enough to turn solid rock into an ionized plasma. A trio of spectrometers in the tool then studies the sparks from the laser fire on 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light to determine the composition of the vaporized rock.
Cheers to American manufacturing for the amazing, high-tech machinery that makes this scientific exploration possible.
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