“While the helicopter is getting ready, I can’t help checking the nearby rocks. This stranger (the rock) made my science team exchange many hypotheses. It is about 15 cm. If you look closely, you can see the row of laser marks where I destroyed them to find out more, ”wrote the space agency in Perseverance’s official Twitter account.
As the image below shows, the Mars rock has huge holes. At first, many may think that they were caused by the laser shots, but in fact the perforations caused by the equipment are much smaller and can only be identified if you look at the photo carefully.
Rock studied by Perseverance.Source: While the helicopter is getting ready, I can’t help checking out nearby rocks. This odd one has my science team trading lots of hypotheses.
It’s about 6 inches (15 cm) long. If you look closely, you might spot the row of laser marks where I zapped it to learn more. pic.twitter.com/sq4ecvqsOu
The laser holes of the Perseverance are in the right corner of the stone, characterized by a row of tiny round marks (see the exact area indicated in red in the photo). It was in this part that the SuperCam instrument fired the beams and heated the rock to a very high temperature, so that a special camera could analyze the resulting vapors and identify their chemical composition.
Looking for signs of microbial life
In early March, the rover did a job similar to this, by firing the beam at a rock that was 3 meters away from it. NASA even released the sounds of Perseverance’s laser shots, similar to the “ticking” of a watch.
The research done that day on a different rock formation, nicknamed “Máaz”, showed that the target reached was composed of basalt, igneous or volcanic rocks common on the surface of Mars and also on Earth.
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