Mars Curiosity Rover Fires Laser, Zaps Rock (Pew, Pew!)

Here you can see the head of Curiosity's mast. On the top sits the ChemCam, a suite of scientific instruments including the laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) system used to zap rocks and the remote micro-imager (RMI) used to snap black-and-white telescopic images (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).

Taken before installation on the rover, this image gets close up with the ChemCam's 5-inch calibration target. The nine circles contain materials that the scientists expect to find on Mars. The top row includes four glass samples similar to Martian igneous rock compositions and graphite. The bottom row holds four ceramic samples similar to sedimentary rock compositions. The titanium square (10) is for wavelength calibration and laser diagnostic tests (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).

This black-and-white image, taken by Curiosity's right-side Navcam, shows where the ChemCam's calibration target is mounted on the rover (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).

In this 10-image mosaic, you can see the ChemCam calibration assembly through the eyes of the ChemCam's remote micro-imager (RMI) (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).

To the left, you can spot N165, the first rock Curiosity zapped with its laser. Scientists are now in the process of analyzing the glowing, ionized gas that the laser excited with a telescope and will identify the chemical elements of the rock (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).

The baseball-sized rock, named Coronation, is the first rock from another planet to be analyzed using the ChemCam laser technique (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).

In its thirteenth day after landing, Curiosity fired its laser at Coronation, hitting the rock with 30 pulses in 10 seconds. Each pulse contained more than 1 million watts of power, exciting atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma. The background shows a Navcam image while the circular inset, taken by the ChemCam, shows the rock in detail before the laser was fired. The square inset is further enlarged and was processed to reveal differences before and after the laser beam (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL).