Curiosity, our cute Mars rover has a friggin’ laser attached to its head. And “he” is not afraid to use it.
This led to the demise of a poor Martian rock, named “Coronation” by JPL scientists. It is about the size of a human fist and was exposed to the laser for about 10 seconds.
Curiosity used it’s head-mounted instrument to examine the mineral composition of Coronation. The light from the laser was sent as 30 pulses. And each pulse of the laser is over a million watts. By way of comparison, your air conditioner uses about 5,000 watts. That’s a lot of power hitting those rocks. Enough power, in fact, to turn the atoms on its surface into plasma. The light emitted by the plasma is then analyzed by instruments on Curiosity to figure out what Coronation is made of.
It may not look like a big deal but hey! we shot a laser beam on another planet. Even THAT is something.
N.
via: Forbes
