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Los Alamos National Laboratory
ChemCam is an instrument that is going
on the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory Rover. It is considered a remote sensing instrument
which means that it's going to look at rocks and soils,
some distance away from the rover.
This works by actually focusing a telescope on the rock
or sample that were interested in, it then fires a number of laser shots.
Then ionize a part of the material of the rock or soil and it then produces
a flash of light because these ionized and electronically excited atoms
and ions decay back to ground state, And you have a little ball of plasma.
And this plasma then is viewed by the telescope,
and some spectrometers that we use. And we break down the light
into characteristic emission lines. Those emission lines tell us
exactly what elements are present in these rocks and at what abundances.
Part of the problem of previous rovers and analytical instruments
that have done remote sensing is that most of the rocks are covered with dust
and often with a little bit of a weathering layer of sorts.
And when you just take an image of the rocks,
you just get the outer surface whether it is dust or the weathering layer.
What is really inside the rock is we are interested in,
and so the first laser shots that we use, can actually move the dust
and the weathering layers. And when you just take an image
of the rocks, you get just the outer surface, whether it's dust or weathering layer.
What is really inside the rock is what we are interested in.
And so the first laser shots that we use, can actually remove the dust
and the weathering layers, so what we are seeing what's inside the rock from a distance.
This is the first active remote sensing instrument
that we'll be using on Mars.
. . . . . . . . . . . . Captions by www.SubPLY.com