ChemCam Team Discusses New Data Acquisition Details
Members of the Los Alamos National Laboratory ChemCam team re-live their experiences during the entry, descent, and landing phase of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, including never-before-seen video from the Science Team viewing area. Then the team updates the Curiosity rover mission with the first laser firing of the ChemCam instrument and follow-on laser firings, and the first data acquisition details.
Transcript
00:00:07 we were all very nervous you think about all the things that could go wrong I was just getting ancier and ancier as we got closer and closer I was uh a little paranoid having been through one uh uh not so good Landing touchdown confirmed we're safe on live we were exuberant that uh everything had gone well the room went crazy and it was
00:00:40 just a really great experience this is a room of very serious people usually and they were just jumping for joy The Landing was absolutely fantastic on the very night of the landing Kim cam was turned on and we did a little check out it just showed us that the instrument was working perfectly up to what we could tell and so we were overjoyed and then uh it was
00:01:05 about Saul or day 13 we call them SS on Mars uh when we were actually able to fire the laser the morning that we were to get the data down after after this day 13 firing uh I went in a little early uh do deap was in from She's our our data person from Los Alamos and uh and uh we were just settling in and Dot jumped up and said the data is already in we were
00:01:34 all a little bit slap happy there to see the data starting to come down from so far away after so much work and uh the data turned out to be beautiful and as well as we as good a data as we could have hoped for I mean we had never seen such a beautiful Spectrum I mean it was beyond our wildest dreams it was so beautiful so the first rock that we shot was a rock that was uh relatively
00:01:59 generic we saw saw silicon oxygen in abundance which typifies these rocks and then we also saw iron magnesium calcium sodium and potassium and on the very first shot we saw a little bit of hydrogen hydrogen can be a difficult Peak to really understand but we've definitely seen it so we know it's there so now the question is what form is it in cem cam has been used extensively
00:02:23 over the over the last uh 25 days we now have fired almost 5,000 laser shots uh at about 80 different uh targets or or points of analysis and we've it's been working just perfectly soon we're going to be transitioning from doing all our operations at jet propulsion laboratory on Marian time to coming back to our home institutions in this case Los Alamos National Laboratory and running
00:02:51 operations more on business hours I'm very thrilled to be part of this and to be uh able to uh participate and help help this uh investigation move forward it's a profound experience because um very few people get to do this so I I'm just really happy to be involved