Since landing on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has been hard at work analyzing rocks and soil on the floor of Jezero Crater with the SuperCam instrument. SuperCam features a rock-vaporizing laser, camera, and microphone that can gather data from a distance. This video provides an instrument update by Hemani Kalucha, one of the SuperCam operations team members from Caltech. The laser pits shown are about .009 inches (250 microns) in diameter and spaced 1/8 inch (3 millimeters) apart. Sounds of an Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flight captured by the SuperCam microphone can be heard in the video NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight. For more information on Perseverance, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/perseverance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/LANL/CNES/IRAP — NASA — Mars, Up Close Source: NASA (https://images.nasa.gov/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:02NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been working on its science mission with the help of the SuperCam Instrument, a rock-vaporizing laser and camera that examines rocks and soils. To learn more about SuperCam, we are joined by Hemani Kalucha. She is the Science Payload Uplink Lead for SuperCam Operations. So SuperCam looks out of the big circular window in the white box on top of the mast and it uses spectroscopy, which is just when light excites atoms in a rock and we get unique shifted wavelengths back to us. And so we use a combination of lasers and infrared vision and that lets us do science even further out than the robotic arm. The lasers reach 7 meters or 23 feet away and the infrared much much further. And that's not even all! We have a tiny high resolution camera and a microphone
0:52Can you talk about some of the images SuperCam has taken and why they are important to scientists? Absolutely. So we started by taking out images in spectra near the rover, and as you can see in this image, the laser actually blows away the dust and makes these small pits in the rocks. And that lets us analyze material that's just below the surface of the rock, which is what we care about. And then we can record the sounds of the laser SuperCam was able to take pictures of these long-distance targets, like Kodiak, and that really helps the rover team understand where to drive next for more close-up analysis. And these red circles you see is actually the infrared telling us about the mineral content of these faraway outcrops.
1:43So that's how SuperCam figures out more about the geological history of Mars. And we're so excited to see what the laser can do next! Thank you so much for joining us today, Hemani. To get the latest updates, follow at NASA JPL and at NASA Persevere on social media. And on the mission website, mars.nasa.gov slash perseverance, you can also find all the raw images being sent back by the rover.
This transcript was generated automatically from the recording, so it will contain mistakes — especially around names and places.