Submitted by soleson on

The NASA Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of Mars for the past eight years, carrying with it the ChemCam instrument as part of its scientific payload. ChemCam is a suite of instruments that includes a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument, which provides chemistry information about geologic materials at standoff distances of up to 7 m from the rover. The ChemCam LIBS instrument has produced over 800,000 individual spectra, an unprecedented number of observations from a single instrument on Mars. With these and other instrument data, we have learned that Curiosity’s landing site in Gale crater once hosted a long-lived freshwater lake that was habitable. As Curiosity continues to produce ever more data, a new NASA Mars rover was recently launched, with a landing date of February 18, 2021. Called Perseverance, this new rover has an all-new science instrument payload, including the SuperCam instrument suite. SuperCam uses a combined LIBS-Raman laser instrument to analyze geologic materials, which allows for direct measurement of both chemistry and mineralogy, thereby uniquely identifying geologic materials. SuperCam also includes a microphone that can record the sound of LIBS acoustic signals, which provides additional information about the material properties of martian rocks. In this talk, I will describe our two instruments, give an overview of current results from ChemCam and the Curiosity mission, and discuss the goals for the soon-to-land Perseverance mission.

Plenary Session