Hear lasers zap rocks on Mars in Perseverance’s latest shipment

Unprecedented audio recordings taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover transport us to the surface of the Red Planet, allowing us to hear the sound of a gentle alien breeze and the click-click of lasers zapping a Martian rock.

We are exactly three weeks into the Perseverance mission, so it’s still early days. The project is in the deployment phase, the Mars 2020 team systematically deploying each of the rover’s many instruments to ensure that they are functioning correctly and that they are configured for the scientific phase of the mission. Perseverance will spend the next two or more years exploring Jezero Crater, so there’s no need to rush things.

The team recently deployed the aptly named rover SuperCam, in a first showcase of the tremendous potential of the instrument. Attached to the mast of the rover, the 12 pounds (5.4–kilogram) SuperCam can perform five different types of geological analyzes, allowing the team to select the best rocks for sampling.

These explorations are important from a geological point of view, but also from an astrobiological point of view. Rocks at Jezero Crater – an ancient lake – could contain fossils or other biomarkers indicating ancient microbial life. While the main objective of the Curiosity mission was to determine whether Mars was once habitable (apparently was), the Perseverance rover is actually looking for evidence of ancient aliens (to be clear, habitability is different from inhabited; Mars may have already favored living conditions, but that doesn’t mean life actually has took root on the red planet).

The SuperCam instrument was developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a consortium of French laboratories led by the Center National d’Etudes Spatiales. The first SuperCam data packet was recently received at the French Space Agency’s control center in Toulouse, according to to a NASA statement. The newly released SuperCam images show a pair of rocks, dubbed Yeehgo and Máaz, in exquisite detail.

“It’s amazing to see SuperCam perform so well on Mars,” SuperCam principal investigator Roger Wiens said in the statement. “When we first imagined this instrument eight years ago, we were concerned about being too ambitious. Now it’s up there that works like a charm.

Perseverance is also unique in that it is able to record sounds on Mars. NASA has provided three different audio samples, and they include the first acoustic recording of laser shots on Mars and the sound of Martian winds.

Perseverance recorded the sounds of the laser at a distance of 3.1 meters from the target rock. The clicking sounds produced by the laser pulses vary, allowing scientists to infer various physical characteristics of the target, such as hardness.

“SuperCam really gives our rovers their eyes to see promising rock samples and ears to hear what it looks like when lasers hit them,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA hhead office in Washington, DC, in the statement. “This information will be critical in determining which samples to cache and ultimately return to Earth through our revolutionary Mars Sample Return Campaign, which will be one of the most ambitious feats ever undertaken by mankind.”

The future mission Zurbuchen in question will be quite historic, as the samples cached by Perseverance would represent the first Martian materials returned to Earth for analysis.

The Mars 2020 team also deployed and received visible and infrared data from the rover. sensor, one of the SuperCam sensors. This instrument collects reflected sunlight, exposing the mineral content of rocks and sediments.

SuperCam ‘s Raman spectrometer also produces data, an achievement which now represents the first time that spectroscopy has been performed elsewhere than on Earth, Olivier Beyssac, CNRS research director at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry in Paris, underlined in the NASA press release. Raman spectroscopy works by projecting light – specifically green laser beams – onto a target object, such as a rock. This non-destructive technique shows how light interacts with chemical bonds in the target, providing information about the object’s chemical structure, internal stress levels, and other information.

“Raman spectroscopy will play a crucial role in the characterization of minerals to better understand the geological conditions in which they were formed and to detect potential organic and mineral molecules that could have been formed by living organisms,” said Beyssac.

For the future, the Mars 2020 team will continue to test the driving capabilities of the rover (this is already stopwatch 21.3 feet [6.5 meters]), and choose an airfield from which to deploy the Ingenuity helicopter.