A selfie of the Curiosity rover taken in October on the planet Mars, against the backdrop of Mount Sharp.

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NASA / JPL

  • This Wednesday, the Curiosity rover celebrates its 3,000th Martian day.

    More than eight years after landing on the Red Planet, he continues to explore its soil.

  • In a month, it will be joined by another NASA rover, Perseverance, whose instruments are tasked with finding traces of previous life.

  • Among the instruments, SuperCam, an improved version of ChemCam, which will help analyze minerals but also allow listening to the wind blowing on the surface of Mars through a microphone.

Eight and a half years ago, when the Curiosity rover put its wheels on the Red Planet, few people suspected that this Wednesday, this little gem of NASA technology would continue to survey Gale crater on the occasion of his 3,000th Martian day.

Yet despite broken, worn tires, he continues to wander the rocky ground, looking for new clues and signs of possible life.

“We made some great discoveries, the biggest one being the habitability of Mars.

For a long time, we ticked the box of water on Mars.

There we know that water made the planet habitable.

Curiosity continues to advance on this habitability, when was it, how it arrived, how it left.

For that we have to go up the layers, it is an open book of geology, the more we go back the more we go towards recent times ”, explains Sylvestre Maurice, the“ father ”of ChemCam, one of the ultra-sophisticated instruments of Curiosity.

BRAVO ChemCam, on Mars since August 6, 2012!

https://t.co/QRH0wGz2FX

- Jean-Yves Le Gall (@JY_LeGall) January 8, 2021

Perseverance, in search of Martian life

This astrophysicist from the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (Univ. Toulouse, CNRS, CNES) has developed this laser camera in Toulouse which has fired more than 830,000 times on the surface, in order to pulverize the rock for better understand its composition.

"Every now and then there are great discoveries, like veins of calcium, calcium sulfate, and then every now and then there are more specialist discoveries, on the mechanisms of water evaporation or well how long the water was on the surface, how it turned the rock into clay.

We have 250 publications, that's a lot and we still have many in front of us, ”continues the man who now has his eyes turned to another project.

In just over a month, on February 18, a new rover will land its wheels on Mars.

At the end of a descent of seven minutes, Perseverance will land on Martian soil with the mission to discover if, one day, this Planet has sheltered life.

And to find out, NASA engineers will again be supported by Toulouse residents, who remotely and every other week alternating with Los Alamos (New Mexico), will manage the SuperCam.

In addition to the infrared laser, which heats the rock to 8,000 ° C and is already fitted to the ChemCam, a second laser has been added as well as an infrared spectroscope.

So many instruments that can provide information on mineralogy.

“We will have both the chemistry, the atoms, and how they are associated with each other, the molecule.

We will be able to go to signatures that potentially have a biological nature.

We know what we're looking for, life is based on the chemistry of carbon, organic chemistry, ”Sylvestre Maurice hopes.

Probe and listen to Mars

Analyzes that will be done on site, near the landing site where the delta of a dry lake is located and traces that suggest that it has been filled and emptied twice.

With at the bottom, deposits of sediment, the most likely to preserve traces of life.

But since two analyzes are better than one, in addition to the one carried out by the Perseverance instruments on site, samples will be chosen, collected, packaged and deposited by the side of the road to go back to the cow's floor in five years.

These 40 samples of less than one kilo recovered in 2026 during a second mission should arrive on Earth in 2031.

While waiting to see if bacteria have ever developed on Mars, scientists will soon be able to listen to what is happening there.

Thanks to its seismometer, the InSight probe had already enabled us to hear the vibrations caused by the wind.

This year, Persévérance will make us listen to the sound of the gusts thanks to the microphone installed on SuperCam.

It will be the first on Mars.

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