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Thursday, August 23, 2012

NASA Event to Discuss Black Holes and Extreme Objects

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

NASA Mars Rover Begins Driving at Bradbury Landing

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster/D.C. Agle 818-354-6278/818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

News release: 2012-256 Aug. 22, 2012

NASA Mars Rover Begins Driving at Bradbury Landing

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-256&cid=release_2012-256

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has begun driving from its landing site, which
scientists announced today they have named for the late author Ray Bradbury.

Making its first movement on the Martian surface, Curiosity's drive combined forward, turn and
reverse segments. This placed the rover roughly 20 feet (6 meters) from the spot where it landed 16
days ago.

NASA has approved the Curiosity science team's choice to name the landing ground for the
influential author, who was born 92 years ago today and died this year. The location where Curiosity
touched down is now called Bradbury Landing.

"This was not a difficult choice for the science team," said Michael Meyer, NASA program scientist
for Curiosity. "Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray
Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars."

Today's drive confirmed the health of Curiosity's mobility system and produced the rover's first wheel
tracks on Mars, documented in images taken after the drive. During a news conference today at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the mission's lead rover driver, Matt Heverly,
showed an animation derived from visualization software used for planning the first drive.

"We have a fully functioning mobility system with lots of amazing exploration ahead," Heverly said.

Curiosity will spend several more days of working beside Bradbury Landing, performing instrument
checks and studying the surroundings, before embarking toward its first driving destination
approximately 1,300 feet (400 meters) to the east-southeast.

"Curiosity is a much more complex vehicle than earlier Mars rovers. The testing and characterization
activities during the initial weeks of the mission lay important groundwork for operating our precious
national resource with appropriate care," said Curiosity Project Manager Pete Theisinger of JPL.
"Sixteen days in, we are making excellent progress."

The science team has begun pointing instruments on the rover's mast for investigating specific targets
of interest near and far. The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument used a laser and
spectrometers this week to examine the composition of rocks exposed when the spacecraft's landing
engines blew away several inches of overlying material.

The instrument's principal investigator, Roger Weins of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico, reported that measurements made on the rocks in this scoured-out feature called Goulburn
suggest a basaltic composition. "These may be pieces of basalt within a sedimentary deposit," Weins
said.

Curiosity began a two-year prime mission on Mars when the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft
delivered the car-size rover to its landing target inside Gale Crater on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The
mission will use 10 science instruments on the rover to assess whether the area has ever offered
environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

In a career spanning more than 70 years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream,
think and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and nearly 50 books, as well as
numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most
celebrated writers of our time.

His groundbreaking works include "Fahrenheit 451," "The Martian Chronicles," "The Illustrated
Man," "Dandelion Wine," and "Something Wicked This Way Comes." He wrote the screenplay for
John Huston's classic film adaptation of "Moby Dick," and was nominated for an Academy Award.
He adapted 65 of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his
teleplay of "The Halloween Tree."

JPL manages the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about Curiosity is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at:
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

NASA to Hold Televised Curiosity Rover Media Briefing Aug. 22

NASA's Curiosity Studies Mars Surroundings, Nears Drive

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Guy Webster / D.C. Agle 818-354-6278 / 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2012-254 Aug. 21, 2012

NASA's Curiosity Studies Mars Surroundings, Nears Drive

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-254&cid=release_2012-254

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been investigating the Martian weather around it and the soil beneath it, as its controllers prepare for the car-size vehicle's first drive on Mars.

The rover's weather station, provided by Spain, checks air temperature, ground temperature, air pressure, wind and other variables every hour at the landing site in Gale Crater. On a typical Martian day, or "sol," based on measurements so far in the two-week old mission, air temperatures swing from 28 degrees to minus 103 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 2 to minus 75 Celsius). Ground temperatures change even more between afternoon and pre-dawn morning, from 37 degrees to minus 132 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to minus 91 Celsius).

"We will learn about changes from day to day and season to season," said Javier Gómez-Elvira of the Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain, principal investigator for the suite of weather sensors called the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS).

Within a week or so, daily Mars weather reports from Curiosity will become available at: http://cab.inta-csic.es/rems/marsweather.html or http://bit.ly/RzQe6p .

One of the two sets of REMS wind sensors is not providing data. "One possibility is that pebbles lofted during the landing hit the delicate circuit boards on one of the two REMS booms," said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We will have to be more clever about using the remaining wind sensor to get wind speed and direction."

An instrument provided by Russia is checking for water bound into minerals in the top three feet (one meter) of soil beneath the rover. It employs a technology that is used in oil prospecting on Earth, but had never before been sent to another planet.

"Curiosity has begun shooting neutrons into the ground," said Igor Mitrofanov of Space Research Institute, Moscow, principal investigator for this instrument, called the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons, or DAN. "We measure the amount of hydrogen in the soil by observing how the neutrons are scattered, and hydrogen on Mars is an indicator of water."

The most likely hydrogen to be found in shallow ground of Gale Crater, near the Martian equator, is in hydrated minerals. These are minerals with water molecules, or related ions, bound into the crystalline structure of rocks. They can tenaciously retain water from a wetter past after all free water has gone.

Curiosity will soon have a different patch of ground beneath it. Today, the six-wheeled rover wiggled its four corner wheels side to side for the first time on Mars, as a test of the steering actuators on those wheels. This was critical preparation for Curiosity's first drive on Mars.

"Late tonight, we plan to send Curiosity the commands for doing our first drive tomorrow," said Curiosity Mission Manager Michael Watkins of JPL.

The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft delivered Curiosity to Mars on Aug. 5, PDT (Aug. 6, EDT). In a two-year prime mission researchers are using the rover's 10 instruments to assess whether the selected study area has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life and for preserving evidence about whether life has existed.

The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of Caltech. More information about Curiosity is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/msl .

You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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First Words of Safe Landing on Mars - Tango Delta Nominal

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

News feature: 2012-253 Aug. 21, 2012

First Words of Safe Landing on Mars - Tango Delta Nominal

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-253&cid=release_2012-253

10:32 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 5 was turning out to be one long minute for Steve Sell. Of
course, the previous six had been significantly protracted as well. When added together, the
entry, descent and landing of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover had been touted as "Seven Minutes
of Terror," and as far as Sell was concerned things were trending in that direction. What the 42-
year-old engineer from Gettysburg, Pa., wanted more than anything in that seventh minute was
to hear the words "UHF Strong."

There had been a debate amongst Curiosity's entry, descent and landing team about what their
first words to indicate that the rover had reached the surface should be. The EDL team at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew their microphones would be "hot" and that NASA TV
was beaming the landing event out live to anybody with the desire and wherewithal to watch.
They also knew that landing safely on Mars meant more than simply landing on Mars – which
any one of the 34 engineers present at JPL's Building 264 Room 230, also known as the "EDL
War Room," will tell you at great length is not simple at all. Their rocket-propelled backpack and
rover-lowering Sky Crane system were getting their first all-up test 154 million miles (248
million kilometers) away from home, and there was still plenty that could go wrong even after
the rover was gently placed on the surface… plenty.

What if the descent stage kept descending right on top of the rover? What if the bridles
connecting the two did not separate? What if the algorithm used to throttle up the engines for
the flyaway maneuver was not accurate?

It was the remaining "what ifs" that made what those first words from Mars confirming the
rover was on the surface so important.

"If we said 'touchdown,' then people not intimately familiar with EDL might infer that Curiosity
was good to go," said Sell. "But two more major calls had to be made before I could begin to
breathe again."

At 10:31:45 p.m. PDT, Jody Davis saw the event record, or EVR, she was looking for appear on
her computer screen in the EDL War Room. She knew that the "Touchdown" EVR would only be
beamed down if the rover's descent stage had throttled down -- a result which could only occur
if the descent stage had offloaded half its weight. The only way the rover could offload half its
weight in an instant is if it were being held up from below.

Davis, a member of the EDL team and an engineer from NASA Langley Research Center in
Virginia, gave the much reviewed, pre-scripted call -- "Tango Delta nominal."

Tango and Delta are phonetic identifiers for T and D, which the team used to represent
touchdown.

One down, two to go, thought Sell. The next call the EDL team was looking for was "RIMU
Stable."

"RIMU stands for Rover Inertial Measurement Unit," said Sell. "The RIMU gives us the rover's
orientation as well as any movement it is making. If we landed on a crumbling crater wall or an
unstable sand dune, or were being dragged by a still-connected descent stage across the
surface, then the RIMU would show that in its data set."

The War Room's David Way, an engineer from JPL, was monitoring that unit's performance.
Eight long seconds after Jody's call, he found the EVR he was looking for.

"RIMU Stable," said Way.

One more crucial milestone to go.

Not receiving that one final call would be something of a long shot to be sure. After all, the
rover was down on the ground, and RIMU indicated it wasn't moving. Their system had been
proven every step of the way so far. But everyone in the EDL War Room got as far as they did
not only because they were excellent engineers, but because of their predilection for
concocting unappetizing entry, descent and landing scenarios – and then figuring out how to
elude them. And one ton of fuel-laden, rocket-firing descent stage climbing straight up, only to
fall right back down on their factory-fresh landing site and an otherwise good-to-go, roving
Mars laboratory was about as unappetizing a scenario as Sell could imagine.

That final confirmation would not come from Sell's location. The final confirmation that
Curiosity had landed clean would come 200 yards and one building away from the EDL War
Room. There, in the Mission Support Area of JPL's Building 230, Adam Steltzner, the mission's
EDL phase lead, was staring across the room at Brian Schwartz, who was not making eye
contact with anyone. Schwartz, the EDL communications engineer, was staring at his screen. His
task was not to check for a good-news EVR from the rover. Instead, he was waiting to see if the
UHF signal became intermittent, faded away or just cut out altogether – all potential indications
that the rover and descent stage had not gone their separate ways.

Eight seconds after the RIMU call – Schwartz looked up.

"UHF strong," said Schwartz.

With that, Steltzner had all the data he needed. Seated directly in front of the pacing EDL Phase
Lead, Allen Chen felt a jab in the shoulder. Chen, the mission's (capsule communicator), knew it
could only mean one thing.

"Touchdown confirmed," said Chen.

***
Epilogue
With time to reflect upon the events of August 5, Curiosity's EDL phase lead states only one
thing fazed him that evening.

"The biggest surprise about EDL was there were no surprises," said Steltzner. "But soon after
we were confirmed down, what I saw on the screen absolutely floored me."

Months, and even years before landing, Steltzner and his team had kicked around the idea of
imaging the final moments of the descent stage's short life. Wouldn't it be cool if the rover's
first pic could be timed just so?

Working with the surface operations team, they got the timing of the first images from the
surface timed for about 40 seconds after landing – a little bit after the time the descent stage
was estimated to impact the ground after flying away to a safe distance.

"We thought the odds were pretty small that we would see it," said Steltzner.

But there, right in the upper-middle of those first rear-hazcam images, was a plume of dust
rising from the surface.

A later image, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE,
aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft in Martian orbit, provides the location
of what Curiosity team members believe is the final destination of the powered descent stage –
or Sky Crane – which was programmed to fly away automatically after safely depositing the
rover on the surface.

"With HiRISE we get the Sky Crane's distance and its compass heading with respect to the
rover," said Steltzner. "The cloud seen in the distance on the Hazcam images is in perfect
alignment with where we would expect to see the descent stage.

"The inescapable conclusion is that we captured the result of what happens when about 2,200
pounds (1,000 kilograms) of Sky Crane intersect with Martian surface at a pretty good clip. It is
truly an amazing shot on a day full of amazing shots."

A video of imagery from the rover during EDL, including Adam Steltzner's commentary, is
available at: http://1.usa.gov/NffoWl .

For more information on NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl and
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl . Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:
http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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Monday, August 20, 2012

New Insight on Mars Expected from New NASA Mission

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Feature Aug. 20, 2012

New Insight on Mars Expected from New NASA Mission

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-252&cid=release_2012-252

PASADENA, Calif. - On Aug. 20, NASA announced the selection of InSight, a new Discovery-class mission that will probe Mars at new depths by looking into the deep interior of Mars.

"We are certainly excited, but our veterans on this team know the drill," said Tom Hoffman, project manager for InSight from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Which is fortunate, because one of the great things we'll get to do on Mars is drill below the surface."

Drilling underneath the red Martian topsoil will be courtesy of InSight's HP3, or Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package - one of the four instruments the Mars lander will carry. Made by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, HP3 will get below Mars' skin by literally pounding it into submission with a 14-inch (35-centimeter), hollowed-out, electromechanically-festooned stake called the Tractor Mole.

"The Tractor Mole has an internal hammer that rises and falls, moving the stake down in the soil and dragging a tether along behind it," said Sue Smrekar, deputy project scientist for InSight from JPL. "We're essentially doing the same thing any Boy or Girl Scout would do on a campout, but we're putting our stake down on Mars."

The German-built mole will descend up to 16 feet (five meters) below the surface, where its temperature sensors will record how much heat is coming from Mars' interior, which reveals the planet's thermal history.

"Getting well below the surface gets us away from the sun's influence and allows us to measure heat coming from the interior," said Smrekar. "InSight is going take heartbeat and vital signs of the Red Planet for an entire Martian year, two Earth years. We are really going to have an opportunity to understand the processes that control the early planetary formation."

InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. The mission is led by W. Bruce Banerdt of JPL. InSight's science team includes U.S. and international co-investigators from universities, industry and government agencies. Along with DLR, the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, or CNES, is also contributing an instrument to the two-year scientific mission.

InSight builds on spacecraft technology used in NASA's highly successful Phoenix lander mission, which was launched to the Red Planet in 2007 and determined that water ice exists near the surface in the Martian polar regions.

Along with providing an onboard geodetic instrument to determine the planet's rotation axis, plus a robotic arm and two cameras used to deploy and monitor instruments on the Martian surface, JPL performs project management for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Discovery Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver will build the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A web video about the Insight mission is online at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1121 . More information about InSight is at: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov .

As a complement to NASA's larger "flagship" planetary science explorations, the Discovery Program goal is to achieve outstanding results by launching many smaller missions using fewer resources and shorter development times. The main objective is to enhance our understanding of the solar system by exploring the planets, their moons, and small bodies such as comets and asteroids. The program also seeks to improve performance through the use of new technology and broaden university and industry participation in NASA missions.

More information about the Discovery Program is at: http://discovery.nasa.gov .

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Curiosity Stretches its Arm

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster / D.C. Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.Webster@jpl.nasa.gov / Agle@jpl.nasa.gov

News feature: 2012-251 Aug. 20, 2012

Curiosity Stretches its Arm

Mars Science Laboratory Mission Status Report

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-251&cid=release_2012-251

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity flexed its robotic arm today for the
first time since before launch in November 2011.

The 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm maneuvers a turret of tools including a camera, a
drill, a spectrometer, a scoop and mechanisms for sieving and portioning samples of
powdered rock and soil.

"We have had to sit tight for the first two weeks since landing, while other parts of the
rover were checked out, so to see the arm extended in these images is a huge moment for
us," said Matt Robinson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead engineer for
Curiosity's robotic arm testing and operations. "The arm is how we are going to get
samples into the laboratory instruments and how we place other instruments onto surface
targets."

Weeks of testing and calibrating arm movements are ahead before the arm delivers a first
sample of Martian soil to instruments inside the rover. Monday's maneuver checked
motors and joints by unstowing the arm for the first time, extending it forward using all
five joints, then stowing it again in preparation for the rover's first drive.

"It worked just as we planned," said JPL's Louise Jandura, sample system chief engineer
for Curiosity. "From telemetry and from the images received this morning, we can confirm
that the arm went to the positions we commanded it to go to."

The image of Curiosity's arm is online at: http://1.usa.gov/OSyG3B .

The turret has a mass of about 66 pounds (30 kilograms). Its diameter, including the tools
mounted on it, is nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters).

"We'll start using our sampling system in the weeks ahead, and we're getting ready to try
our first drive later this week," said Mars Science Laboratory Deputy Project Manager
Richard Cook of JPL.

Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago to begin a two-year mission using 10 instruments
to assess whether a carefully chosen study area inside Gale Crater has ever offered
environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars
Science Laboratory Project, including Curiosity, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington. JPL designed and built the rover. The Space Division of MDA Information
Systems Inc. built the robotic arm in Pasadena.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at:
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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New NASA Mission to Take First Look Deep Inside Mars

Voyager at 35: Break on Through to the Other Side

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Curiosity Mission Status Report: Rover's Laser Instrument Zaps First Martian Rock

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster/D.C. Agle 818-354-5011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.Webster@jpl.nasa.gov / Agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Mission Status Report Aug. 19, 2012

Rover's Laser Instrument Zaps First Martian Rock

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-248&cid=release_2012-248

PASADENA, Calif. - Today, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser for the first time on Mars, using the beam from a science instrument to interrogate a fist-size rock called "Coronation."

The mission's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, hit the fist-sized rock with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second.

The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light from that spark with a telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about what elements are in the target.

"We got a great spectrum of Coronation -- lots of signal," said ChemCam Principal Investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M. "Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it's payoff time!"

ChemCam recorded spectra from the laser-induced spark at each of the 30 pulses. The goal of this initial use of the laser on Mars was to serve as target practice for characterizing the instrument, but the activity may provide additional value. Researchers will check whether the composition changed as the pulses progressed. If it did change, that could indicate dust or other surface material being penetrated to reveal different composition beneath the surface. The spectrometers record intensity at 6,144 different wavelengths of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.

"It's surprising that the data are even better than we ever had during tests on Earth, in signal-to-noise ratio," said ChemCam Deputy Project Scientist Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. "It's so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years."

The technique used by ChemCam, called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, has been used to determine composition of targets in other extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on the sea floor, and has had experimental applications in environmental monitoring and cancer detection. Today's investigation of Coronation is the first use of the technique in interplanetary exploration.

Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago, beginning a two-year mission using 10 instruments to assess whether a carefully chosen study area inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

ChemCam was developed, built and tested by the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and research agency, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project, including Curiosity, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the rover.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

More information about ChemCam is available at http://www.msl-chemcam.com .

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