THE WOODLANDS, Texas, March 19, 2013 When it comes to examining the surface of rocks on Mars with a high-powered laser, five is a magic number for Los Alamos National Laboratory postdoctoral researcher Nina Lanza.
During a poster session today at the 44th Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, Texas, Lanza described how the laser-shooting ChemCam instrument aboard the Curiosity rover currently searching the surface of Mars for signs of habitability has shown what appears to be a common feature on the surface of some very different Martian rocks during Curiosity's first 90 days on the Red Planet.
But exactly what that common feature is remains an intriguing mysteryand one that Lanza intends to solve.
The ChemCam instrument uses an extremely powerful laser to vaporize a pinpoint of rock surface. The instrument then reads the chemical composition of the vaporized sample with a spectrometer. The highly accurate laser can fire multiple pulses in the same spot, providing scientists with an opportunity to gently interrogate a rock sample, even up to a millimeter in depth. Many rocks are zapped 30 to 50 times in a single location, and one rock was zapped 600 times.
Members of the ChemCam team generally discard results from the first five laser blasts because of a belief that after the first five blasts, the laser has penetrated to a depth that provides a true representative sample of rock chemistry.
Instead of tossing out those data, however, Lanza looked at them specifically across a diverse set of Martian rocks. She found that the first five shots had chemical similarities regardless the rock type. What's more, after five shots, like other scientists had noticed, the spectrum from the vaporized rock stabilized into a representative sample of the rock type below.
"Why is it always five shots?" Lanza wondered.
It could be the first five shots were reading a layer of dust that had s
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| Contact: James E. Rickman jamesr@lanl.gov 505-665-9203 DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory Source:Eurekalert |
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