Perseverance has already shaped scientific history by making the first audio recording on Mars. But the instrument with the microphone, known as the SuperCam, wasn’t made there. It has a lot of other science to do, and recently it started going through some more preliminary testing. In one of these tests, a stone was blasted with a laser while an audio recording was being made of it.
SuperCam itself is the brainchild of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory and a consortium of European research universities, with the French Center National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in the lead. It is touted as the successor to the ChemCam introduced on Curiosity. However, the functions are vastly improved, as evidenced by the audio recordings.
Sound of SuperCam of Perseverance’s first laser shots on Mars.
Photo credit: NASA
There are 5 main recording instruments integrated into the SuperCam, which perform their main task of understanding the chemical composition of rocks and soil. These instruments include the microphone, a visible and infrared sensor (VISIR), and a Raman spectrometer that uses a green laser to zap stones and analyze the signal emitted by the chemical bonds that the laser zapp breaks.
Part of what makes SuperCam so unique is that all of these instruments work together. VISIR can analyze the visual and infrared light emitted from a rock using the spectrometer’s green laser while the microphone is recording a recording as it did recently. The analysis of the integrated data will hopefully be more useful. Adding the recording of the microphone to the spectrometer analysis can increase the validity of what each individual instrument could observe for itself.
Image of an isolated SuperCam before it was mounted on Perseverance.
Photo credit: CNES
So far, the data has only just been received, so no real scientific evidence or analysis has yet been published. But images and audio recordings can provide their own beautiful portrait of another world, regardless of whether they have been analyzed or not. This is exactly what Perseverance has done particularly well so far. With luck, his systems, including the SuperCam, will continue to work great for the duration of the mission, and hopefully for much longer.
Learn more:
NASA – Perseverance Rover’s SuperCam Science Instrument delivers initial results
BBC – Nasa’s Perseverance Mars Rover listens to its rock-zapping laser
SciAm – Endurance Mars Rover records the sound of a rock-zapping laser
UT – Endurance has started to ride Mars
Mission statement:
Close-up of the target rock from the first SuperCam laser experiment.
Photo credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / CNRS / ASU / MSSS
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