SuperCam is installed on the Perseverance rover.

-

CNES / VR2Planet

  • The Perseverance rover landed its wheels on February 18 on the Red Planet, with the mission to search for traces of past life.

  • Its flagship instrument, SuperCam designed in France, is now operational and has already used its infrared laser.

  • The microphone, which is on SuperCam, also recorded the first sounds of the Martian wind.

He rolls, he sees and he hears.

Less than three weeks after landing on the Red Planet, all the lights are green for the Perseverance rover.

And the same goes for its flagship SuperCam instrument.

This Wednesday, the CNES delivered a more than reassuring health bulletin of this jewel of technologies which must track down traces of past life on Mars.

So fit, he's already started taking pictures of specks of dust as big as a tenth of a millimeter, the size of a hair.

Enough to target precisely the rock you want to analyze.

And that's what SuperCam did by unsheathing its infrared power laser.

“We were fortunate on the twelfth day of the mission to shoot at a target called Maaz.

We have a very beautiful spectrum, we see major elements, silicon, potassium, calcium, aluminum for example, and then minor elements such as manganese and hydrogen.

At this stage we have not completed the complete analysis but it is a basaltic type rock, quite common on Earth.

We still have to work to see if it was already there, of volcanic type, or which was brought back by all this water which flowed inside the Jezero crater ”, details Sylvestre Maurice, the scientific co-director of SuperCam.

There is also still work to be done on the mineralogy of this rock, the way in which atoms are linked together.

To achieve this, for the first time on Mars, a green laser beam was used.

This Raman spectrometer can also detect certain organic molecules.

"This will play a crucial role in the characterization of minerals allowing a better understanding of the geological conditions of their formation and the detection of potential organic and mineral molecules which could have been formed by living organisms", continues Olivier Beyssac, research director of the CNRS at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry.

Good sound

But the spectacle on Mars in recent days was not all visual.

He was also in the helmet.

"Close your eyes and listen to the first sounds recorded in the frequencies audible on the surface of Mars, exactly as you would hear them with your own ears if you were there," insisted Naomi Murdoch during the broadcast of a few seconds of recording.

This researcher at the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space, whose team designed the microphone developed by her team and integrated into SuperCam, did not hide her enthusiasm to share what is still there. two weeks were completely unknown: the sound ambience of Mars.

Things are sounding really good here.

Listen to the first sounds of wind captured by my SuperCam microphone.

This mic is located at the top of my mast.

For this recording, my mast was still down so the sound is a bit muffled.

https://t.co/0KpN30oIro

- NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 10, 2021

We are a long way from a mistral day, but these sounds will soon reveal a lot of information on the difference between two rocks that look like two drops of water or on atmospheric science.

Science

Perseverance on Mars: The rover has traveled its first meters

Science

Perseverance: NASA publishes panoramic photo of Mars

  • Nasa

  • Perseverance

  • Cones

  • March

  • Space

  • Science